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Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

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Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#371

Post by dragonwriter »

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 fake wire transfer receipt is fraud. That's a criminal offense.

True. Of course, in CA, not having posted paydays or not paying on the posted paydays is also a criminal offense.

> California has a large prison system, with cell space available.

Well, given that it only just cleared below the threshold set in the long case over unconstitutional overcrowding, and is still well over 125% of capacity, I don't know that I'd characterize it as having "cell space available".

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#372

Post by joekrie »

pyre wrote: post #47
seibelj wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landing page: > WrkRiot pulls signals from your resume and matches them to job posts. That's right, we do the searching for you. We'll be updating this section with videos, walk thru's and more. "walk thru's"? This website looks like garbage

Just look at the blog too. I'm not sure who thought that a blog post entitled "10 WAYS TO SURVIVE AT WORK WITHOUT SLEEP" would be a hit with job seekers. (Not to mention that 100% of their blog content -- 7 posts -- was posted 3 days ago)

I'm blocked by a sign in page. Did they take down the blog in the last day?

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#373

Post by gumby »

tootie wrote: post #323
gcb0 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here how it happens: a company, that is not really a company, keeps applying for tons of h1b. they usually have some title like consulting. they get the h1b and don't even bring the programmers from India. they become "visa holders" companies. the h1b's then start to look for work on their own, or the holder. and once the programmer is hired, the visa holder company gets paid, take 70% (or 60% if the programmer found…

There are plenty of organizations that use H1-Bs properly and correctly, but when people talk about H1-B fraud it's exactly as you describe. They've poisoned the well. It also explains why there are people that can honestly claim we need more H1-Bs because legitimate use is being choked out.

> "They've poisoned the well. "

That's exactly right. It has always costs every company I have been with more to hire an H-1 than a local person so we have only done it if we can't get anyone local -- which is exactly the way the system is supposed to work, and that intended system seems perfectly fair to me.

These scammers fuck it up for the rest of us.

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#374

Post by erikb »

Theodores wrote: post #335
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…

> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_B_personality_disorder... For some reason we are not educated about this. We learn it the hard way by being taken in with what seems a good opportunity, then getting abused and then going our own way. We naively be…

It's really infuriating how few people will believe you and follow up on the 'tells'. Even people who must have experienced that before. The only reason I can think of for that behavior is an inate hope that other people are reasonable.

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#375

Post by harwoodleon »

novaleaf wrote: post #212
harwoodleon wrote: post #100

Penny, if you do end up reading the comments on here, be sure of a few things: You have generated more traffic to their site than Jess ever will. You are not alone in your experiences. You are obviously a great professional and you will probably do well. You have shamed the company into probable closure (which is a good thing) as the guy would get worse with more money and bigger teams. For everyone involved in a sta…

A rant: I hate the "in crowd" subtext that goes on with all these postmortem posts. People in-the-know know what company and people are being discussed in these posts. Accordingly, "I know privileged information." banter is thrown around. I wish that, for the sake of those outside the loop (me at least), people either name-names or take the wink-nods to a private message. This is probably going to be a very unpopular…

Hit by it all the time? Where do you live? Vegas?

If the SV echo chamber extends to Texas, you might be right about the club.

She's just being careful! If she has brought the company down by explaining her position she may get in all sorts of trouble by naming them too.

Lawyers would love to take her down if there's been a lot of money creamed. He'll probably use this HN thread to blame her for his company failure.

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#376

Post by newllama »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #351
cyberferret wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://medium.com/@taliajane/an-open-letter-to-my-ceo-fb73d...

I'm almost certain that this is the post he had in mind while writing this comment.

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#377

Post by dragonwriter »

jomamaxx wrote: post #205
einhverfr wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay people in regular ways through regular channels. Seriously, though, ADP delivers paystubs. If they were using ADP, they would have gotten paystubs.

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.

> When a company has just started, they may have not set this up.

The correct (and only non-criminal) order of operations is (1) figure this out, (2) start hiring employees.

If you can't calculate withholdings and all those other things that get listed on a paystub correctly (which is the only thing that would stop you from generating a paystub), you are breaking the law (civilly and perhaps criminally under federal and state tax and other laws, that require the withholdings, deductions, etc.)

If you don't (in California, where this occurred) have posted paydays with at least the legally specified frequency, or don't pay employees on those paydays, you are breaking the law (criminally, under state employment laws, as well as possibly civilly.)

So, if you haven't figured this out, you have no business hiring employees.

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#378

Post by cperciva »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #370
cperciva wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading a couple years ago about a company where the CEO came in and announced that they weren't going to be able to make payroll so he was going to have to lay everybody off; some of the employees left, but others stuck around working "for free", and the company turned around within a few months. A couple years later they exited and the CEO gave large gifts to the employees who stuck around because they d…

An honest CEO would have awarded stock in lieu of pay.

IIRC it was a small business which didn't do stock/option grants. Actually I can't remember if it was even incorporated.

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#379

Post by zem »

GuiA wrote: post #120
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…

Outside of the edit window for my comment, but wanted to add: the H1B situation sounds fishy as hell. 8 H1Bs costs a lot of money, which the company does not seem to abound with. It seems like something weird might be going on here - if the founders are willing to forge receipts and lie about the company, it might not be beyond them to hold on to passports or some such for "immigration reasons", which would then expl…

as an H-1B myself, you don't need to hold on to passports to buy that sort of "loyalty". moving here from anywhere in asia is a huge sunk cost, and the natural impulse is to hope against hope that you don't have to bite the bullet and go back home, essentially eating that cost and starting over.

plus (at least from an indian perspective) there was a time when the indian job market for programmers was so bad that people would put up with all sorts of abusive conditions, simply because they knew that if they went back home it would be to a long and depressing job search that would likely end up with a low-paying position. (i believe that has gotten better in recent years; i'm not sure what the situation in china is)

Re: Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

#380

Post by sctb »

taheca wrote: post #98

Oh please please please everyone.. check out her Soundcloud page. https://soundcloud.com/tessstevens May I suggest Don't look back into the sun. Just skip to the middle to hear the singing.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12379811 and marked it off-topic.
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