Business ProfileforNew England's Wedding DJ Events & Lighting Co.

If I could give **** 0 stars or negative stars I would.TL;DR **** / New England's DJ is a fraud and we are losing our deposit money alongside having to find his replacement within a short timeframe.My fiancee and I booked ****** services over a year and a half ago for our wedding in September 2020. Unfortunately, our wedding was postponed to this year due to COVID-19 and we were under the impression that we still had a DJ.Fast-forward to now and our wedding is only a couple of weeks away. We reached out to **** via text to ask if he needed anything from us for our wedding. He told us that he was returning from vacation and to send him the details of our wedding day again.A couple of days later he told us that he would not be able to make it to our wedding due to his daughter being diagnosed with Cancer the week prior. During this time, he sent us very elaborate text messages stating that he was going out to California to tend to his daughter for her treatments and that he would return our deposit the following day through PayPal.The next day comes and he texts us saying that he would not be able to return our deposit through PayPal because his bank accounts in ********** are not working and that he was working on switching them. He then asked for our address to send us a physical check which we were not comfortable with and this struck us as a bit odd. We requested that he send us our refund through PayPal immediately.After we requested the immediate refund, he got very defensive and said that he "canceled $20,000 worth of deposits and was broke." We explained to him that, at first, we were understanding of his circumstances, but that he should not be spending people's deposits. Not only do we now have to find a new DJ for our wedding but he basically told us that we were not getting our deposit back which was $275.His communication with us and the telling of his situation were VERY inconsistent. He was telling us that his daughter's tumor had shrunk only a week after being diagnosed! Cancer treatment does not work that quickly (we wish it did!). After we argued with him and told him that we were going to put in a dispute with PayPal / our bank for our deposit THEN he said he would be returning to ************* and would be able to DJ our wedding. At this point, the relationship was already tarnished and we wanted nothing to do with him as our DJ. All of this communication occurred within a week and because we had booked him over PayPal's 180 day dispute policy we could not put in a claim with them. We ended up putting in a dispute request with our credit card company but that is also not guaranteed to get our deposit back.Overall, DO NOT contract **** or New England's DJ for ANY events unless you want to be lied to by a fraud and lose out on any money you give him. We hope that he would not use his daughter's Cancer diagnosis as an excuse to cut and run with deposit money but we have correspondence that shows how fishy his story is. He even had the audacity to argue with my fiancee over the phone and tell us that we would not be getting our deposit back because he could supposedly make it to our wedding after canceling, traveling to **********, and coming back to *************. Why would he be on vacation if his daughter just got diagnosed with Cancer and he needed to spend all of the deposit money for her treatment? PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not contract him!!!