I would strongly recommend AGAINST anyone hiring Andrei Buletin.
I contacted him on March 24th, 2013 to help build a storage box for my bicycle. We reached an agreement, and I sent him a 50% deposit, which he confirmed receiving back in March.
After that, however, he never finished the project, and never refunded my deposit.
I sent him him many emails that were just ignored, until I threated to report him for fraud. I would send him 5-10 emails over a month long period, and not hear back until I threatened him, and then I would get excuses like (these are from different emails, on different dates):
This went on for several months, until in May, nearly 2 months after I hired him for a project that was supposed to take 2 weeks, he agreed to refund my deposit, but said it would be several weeks and he would issue a refund on June 1st. He said he needed the money for "cancer treatment". If he needed the money, he should have just finished the project, instead of keeping a deposit for a project he never intended to finish. This was one of his final emails:
As you can see, he acknowledges his lack of response to my previous emails, and clearly agreed to refund my deposit.
I have all emails saved as evidence, and will be also reporting him for fraud on paypal.
Anyway, it is now June 19th, almost 3 weeks since he promised to refund my deposit, and he has not done so. He doesn't respond to emails, and has completely disappeared.
DO NOT HIRE Andrei Buletin! He took my deposit, didn't complete the job, didn't issue a refund as promised, and doesn't respond to emails anymore. He is a con artist. STAY AWAY, unless you want to lose your money.
PS: I know the mods here on shapeways have deleted some earlier posts about problems with Andrei, but it is important to share this kind of information so that other people don't get ripped off. That makes the community stronger. I would welcome a response from Andrei if he dares, and would be happy to edit my post if he ever does make the situation right. But I would hate to see anyone else on shapeways get ripped off by this guy as well. Also, if the mods here doubt the sincerity of my post, feel free to private message me, and I can forward all emails to you to show in detail what transpired.
UPDATE (6-20-2013): Andrei has now refunded my deposit. He also asked that I be clear about the fact that even though he never finished the project, before he stopped responding to email, he did provide some sample diagrams for an unfinished design (around mid April). These were png images that were not printable, and not complete.