I've experienced a quite similar situation.
Moved to a new city with a promise of a nice pay and a good job for a startup. First month of the project CEO ended up in a psyc ward. Luckily I got out with my head and limbs still attached to my body.
Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup
271–280 of 619 posts
Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup
#272The 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.
I fear that they don't even know the real name of their CEO!
It's okay, the DA office would find out for them.
Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup
#273The 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.
Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup
#274"About a month in, our interim leader returned to Korea, and a woman was brought in who had worked at several video game companies. She used to know our CEO’s in college. She was kind, thoughtful, and attentive. I knew the company would eat her alive. After our boss departed, I took over a few of his duties. One of them was “viral marketer.” I was now creating ad campaigns on Facebook in an attempt to bring monthly a…
Looks like she's still at it: https://instagram.com/p/BJi8IpgDaPg/
> Digital Don Draper.
FFS.
Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup
#275Red Flag 4.5: The high percentage of H1Bs with little experience. This visa is meant to be for people with irreplaceable skills, not cheap labour.
How is it that an "H1B with little experience" is even possible, then?
Legally, all you have to do is post a job offering on some dark corner of the internet for your job that pays a fair market wage. If you can't hire anyone for a specific period, you get to look for an H1-B!
The problem is that "fair market wage" is actually defined legally by congress. That wage for IT related jobs is barely enough to make a proper middle-class living in a metal trailer 2 hours outside of Las Vegas, much less San Francisco, New York City, or even Atlanta.
So you basically base your office in a city where the COL is high, require your employee to live in said city, and post job listings with a wage no US Citizen who lives in that city would take. If you get anyone actually desperate enough, you invent some magical reason they don't qualify. Not enough experience (10 years for a tech that's been out 2), didn't have experience with JMS (1 out of the 2,000 tech keywords on your listing and honestly if you can write a java application you can read a JMS queue, it's 10 minutes of google), or any of the other reasons you can invent to not hire someone. It's the exact same strategy deployed to not hire someone based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or ethnicity.
Then, you get your cheap H1-B worker who can't leave your company or even change their job title or they get deported.
Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely yes, though it depends on the transparency of the rest of the team really. I have been involved with three companies in my career which pulled out of this seeming nosedive. One of the companies was going through a really horrible time. They had just got done releasing software that was horribly behind schedule which relieved their customers, but it was still stressful. They were working on settling two law…
These are great stories, thank you! What about the third company..?
I wasn't as involved with the third company's solution as I was with the first two I mentioned. The third company was a real estate software company. The problem was there was a down turn in the market that was rather unexpected (this wasn't the '08-'09 down turn, this was much much smaller than that). The company couldn't absorb the slowing of revenue as much as they wanted to be able to and ultimately they got into trouble. The company was completely bootstrapped, single owner, no investors, as it is to this day. Payday was set for a Friday. On Wednesday the owner knew there would be trouble. He told everyone that payroll wouldn't make it by Friday and to give him the weekend to find the money needed to pay everyone off. By Tuesday he would decide whether the company was still viable or needed to be shuttered.
This lead to a number of interesting situations. He did make payroll the next Monday (he literally sold everything he had, went to his elderly parents and begged them for some, and made it happen. Someone had to drive him into work on Monday because he sold his cars). A good percentage of the employees left that day and never returned. Some of us stayed, believing in the business, his honesty and integrity. I was just an engineer but we did turn it around and actually he had some great plans on how to never get into that situation again. He actually did very well after the 08'-09' market downturn and his business is still very profitable to this day.
Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
When a company has just started, they may have not set this up. You can invoice the company. It's not a big deal. Again - of all flags - lack of pay stubs is the least of them if it's just a garage startup with 3-ish people. The actual exchange of money is 100x a stronger indicator of health than the presence of a stub.
OTOH, you can generate paystubs through literally any halfway-decent bookkeeping software. I get running a lean shop, but once you expand from one employee to two, one of your first investments should be in some sort of accounting system in order to make sure every last goddamn penny is tracked with as long and complete a paper trail as possible. Any good entrepreneur knows that if you don't know where every cent of…
Wasn't one of the excuses the CEO had for missing pay dates that his money was tied up in IRS dealings? Maybe a copy of QuickBooks would've helped with that.
Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup
#278Hey guys, just wanted to clear the air on some of the speculation: I'm actually with WrkRiot and can guarantee you we're not the company in question: I've got many weeks of paid on time pay stubs sitting right here. Plus we didn't have anyone matching any of the descriptions in this article. Interesting article though, it's really shitty some have bad experiences like this.
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.
Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup
#279> Wanting to put a good foot forward, I brushed off the confusion
This is codependence, defined.
Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup
#280The 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.
Overcrowding is still a problem with California's prisons [0], to the point where inmates are getting dumped into smaller communities through realignment under AB 109 [1].
Hopefully the perps involved will get plenty of hotbunking time, though.
[0] www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_24980457/california-prison-overcrowding-governor-asks-court-more-time
[1] http://patch.com/california/gilroy/bp--ab-109-californias-fe...