Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 619 posts

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#351

Post by jsprogrammer »

cyberferret wrote: post #184
sanderjd wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd, I've never come across a rant like that. But I do seem to see self satisfied "millennial" bashing pretty often. (I don't think I'll ever understand this impulse to ascribe vague personality traits to broad groups of people across a large number of birth years.)

Apologies, it was probably a little too judgemental and unnecessarily tarred a lot of people with a wide brush, but there was a phase about 12 months ago where Medium was full of posts, to paraphrase what someone else said: "By unknown twenty-something year olds posting angst driven articles about leaving some unknown valley startup as if they were Jimmy Page leaving Led Zeppelin"...

Could you please link to one of those posts so that we may read one?

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#352

Post by erikb »

ryanSrich wrote: post #273
Animats wrote: post #105

The fake wire transfer receipt is fraud. That's a criminal offense. Have a talk with the local DA. California has a large prison system, with cell space available. I've never heard of a startup going that far.

This was by far the biggest red flag. I'd completely forget about the wage claims and wrongful termination suit and pursue this instead.

You can only think in these morally high ways if your rent is paid for by other means. Otherwise the most important thing is getting any money.

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#354

Post by erikb »

ef4 wrote: post #56
GuiA wrote: post #14

Welcome to the club. It's pretty much a rite of passage here to spend some time with a psychopath VC, a completely self absorbed CTO with a rich investor dad that fuels his fantasies, or an idiotic CEO with an ego problem, and to pay the price for it (just time if you're lucky, time+money if you're not). I've encountered this myself several times (down to the CEO using hire fast fire fast as a mantra), and judging fr…

> It's pretty much a rite of passage here... most people have or will That's pretty silly. Plenty of people working in startups never put themselves through that kind of BS. There are at last two obvious strategies for avoiding the whole problem: (1) be a founder, (2) work in a more established tech company until you have the experience, personal network, and finances to intelligent pick a startup to work for.

You think as founder you don't have to deal with that? Oh boy, you're in for quite a few surprises. And how do you learn about how to handle this if you work at more established companies?

It's the kind of thing we all already know of because of tv shows like game of thrones. But experiencing and actually handling it is another topic.

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#356

Post by Animats »

Animats wrote: post #105

The fake wire transfer receipt is fraud. That's a criminal offense. Have a talk with the local DA. California has a large prison system, with cell space available. I've never heard of a startup going that far.

The article says "That afternoon in the office, Michael emailed each employee a personalized PDF receipt of a Wells Fargo wire transfer ...". The sample shown is for $12,000. The total for all employees is probably over $100,000.

If this happened in Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's office has jurisdiction. They have a Major Fraud Unit. "The Major Fraud Unit is responsible for prosecuting cases involving serious and complex fraud, also known as White Collar Crime, where the loss exceeds $100,000. The Unit emphasizes theft cases that are accomplished by lying or the breach of a trusted or fiduciary relationship with the victim as opposed to the taking of property covertly, or by force or fear." Any questions?

The Santa Clara DA's office has a staff of over 500 people. This is one of the things they do. White-collar crime prosecutions often start at the DA's office, rather than coming from police agencies. The DA's office has their own investigators. There's also a process for getting restitution from convicted criminals. This routinely "pierces the corporate veil" and means the criminal is ordered to pay up as part of their punishment.

[1] https://www.sccgov.org/sites/da/prosecution/DistrictAttorney...

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#357

Post by pascalmemories »

TechieKid wrote: post #316
morgosmaci wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would have to download the app they spammed with vibrates and let it install.

Thanks for the reply! This isn't very clear to me. I actually opened the link in a new tab with Firefox for Android, had Firefox ask me for permission to access my camera and mike(?), denied those and closed the tab as I read pascalmemories' comment i.e. I never actually saw the content, so "you would have to download the app they spammed with vibrates" doesn't mean anything to me. Perhaps that's a good thing? :) I'v…

I was browsing in Chrome with a brand new phone which thankfully did not have anything on it. Despite clearing all the app data (which normally cleans out browse-by if it's just annoying page javascript in my experience) the damn vibrate, play noises and throw multiple pop-ups just kept on coming and would not let me close them.

I had to resort to a factory wipe to clean it; it was not a great deal since it was a phone I'd literally today just taken out the box, but if it had been something I had data on and used for a while, it would have been a serious PITA.

I suspect the ad network malware pumper saw the visit spike and decided the traffic volume warranted an exploit delivery instead of their usual junk ad content.

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#358

Post by pluma »

threatofrain wrote: post #196
pluma wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Name and shame" feels good but there's a huge danger in pillorying people just based on a single person's account. WrkRiot seems to be the company in question and their online presence is so laughable nobody here likely feels bad for making fun of them, especially because of the behaviour the author describes. But the story is not just about a company but also about individuals. Consider WrkRiot's head of marketing,…

It should be noted that the criminal justice system is not there to give justice to individuals. The district attorney functions as the representative of state interests. If you are a victim of medical malpractice, the district attorney will not find healing for you. If someone wrongfully injures you, a criminal case will not return even an inch of your wholesomeness. If someone cheats or robs you of $50k, the distri…

True, but at least some of the accusations seem to imply criminal behaviour on part of the founder(s). Manipulating screenshots from the bank and passing them off as real sounds like forgery to me -- but I admit I'm not intimately familiar with the US criminal justice system.

That said, of course there are safe conclusions to draw from this story (especially the ones that hold true in general) but all personal accusations should always be taken with a grain of salt, especially if you have no personal knowledge of any of the people involved.

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#359

Post by pluma »

mikekij wrote: post #278
kyrias wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disregarding everything else pointed out in this thread, there's also the part where the website for the older name of the company, 1for.one, still lists Penny Kim as the Marketing Director: http://web.1for.one/digital-press-kit/ And, just in case they now decide to remove that, I also saved it to the wayback machine, available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160829104022/http://web.1for.o... So good try, scumbag…

One of their employees now lists "JobSonic" as their employer. Ironically, searching for "Job Sonic" results in the Jobs page for Sonic, the fast food chain. Bunch of rocket scientists over there.

That might mean Penny actually meant JobSonic when she called the company name "anti SEO". Amazing they replaced it with one that's almost as bad (1for.one). At least the new one (WrkRiot) is googleable...

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#360

Post by castis »

jamisteven wrote: post #293

I see nothing about her researching these founders prior to agreeing to work for them, nothing about a signed contract, something like this would never happen to me, sounds like this girl needs a good lesson in street smarts. Way too gullible.

Sure, all the information about those people is out there now, but we don't know the state of information that she had available to her before this.

It's good that you stopped by to point out that you're better than others, though. Looks good on you.

Post reply on HN