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CEO of Defunct Silicon Valley Startup Indicted For Allegedly Tricking Employees Into Working For Free (theregister.co.uk)
The founder and CEO of a shuttered Silicon Valley startup has been indicted for tricking employees into working without pay and for lying about his credentials and financing. From a report: In an indictment unsealed this week, Isaac Choi, founder and CEO of failed Silicon Valley job search startup WrkRiot, was charged with five counts of wire fraud for allegedly defrauding former employees. Problems at the upstart surfaced in August when Penny Kim, former head of marketing for the company, published an account of her experience at an unnamed biz. She said the unspecified outfit failed to pay her and forged wire transfer confirmations to make it appear it had transferred owed funds. After it emerged that Kim was talking about WrkRiot, the company threatened legal action. By the end of August, when former CTO Al Brown acknowledged being the person referred to as "Charlie" in Kim's post and corroborated her claims, WrkRiot had shut down its website and Facebook page.
If they kept working after seeing the forged wire transfer, then they were also tricked into working for free. It really can be both.
Unfortunately, that's a fantasy story. Corporations have always tried to abuse workers to benefit the company/management/executives. That's why unions were born. You might disagree with them today, but their origins were in abused employees who had no leverage against the companies running their lives in and out of work and government that always sided with the companies.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.