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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.
I hate when they do this stuff. Forging a wire transfer is NOT 'tricking you into working for free'. Instead it is tricking people into thinking they were paid. Or more accurately: Wire Fraud against their own employees.
Tricking someone into working for free would mean the employee had to have done something stupid like accepting a bet on a coin flip that turned out to be a two headed coin.
What person felt the need to downgrade the horrible crime of wire fraud into merely 'tricking'?
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Lying to employee's about their pay, and cheating them is illegal. Sorry, the asshole should be hanged for screwing hopeful workers over. Short of hanging, which is unlikely, he should get time in maximum security with the rest of the scum.
he should get time in maximum security with the rest of the scum.
Nonsense. Prisons, and especially max-sec prisons, should only be used for violent people that need to be physically separated from civilized society. For everyone else there are more appropriate and constructive alternatives. For instance, this guy could have all his assets seized, and spend 40 hours per week for the next 10 years changing bed pans in a nursing home. That way he will be contributing to society instead of being a burden, and his kids won't grow up in a broken home.
Toward the end of the last dotcom bubble, you'd see stories similar to this, where the founder was able to keep their employees working even after the money was gone. I would imagine this happens a lot during the death stage in lots of small businesses. From what I've seen, the difference between tech startups and your average small businesses is that some of the employees become brainwashed to some extent. They've been putting in 100 hour weeks for so long that nothing will convince them that it's time to get out.
I think part of the problem with startups is that the founders are these "serial entrepreneur" types who (a) have difficulty dealing with actual employees, and (b) have a huge personal financial cushion to fall back on and therefore have no idea how bad not getting a paycheck can be for "normal" people. Larger companies may move slowly and have dumb rules and a bureaucracy, but most large companies don't make it a regular habit of shorting employees' wages. Startup founders are a lot more likely to say "Oh well, I guess it's time to close up...time to chase that "Uber for nurses" opportunity!" and forget about who they're leaving behind.
Possibly between the current age, and the age of the robber barons, but that's debatable.
No, that is not debatable. That was a time when corporations dumped methylmercury into drinking water supplies, used coerced convict labor, and helped run the death camps of the Holocaust. The is no evidence, none whatsoever, that there was ever a "golden age" of corporate ethics and honesty. If anything, companies are most honest and ethical today, simply because it is harder to hide misdeeds, and the consequences of getting caught are more severe.