CEO of Defunct Silicon Valley Startup Indicted For Allegedly Tricking Employees Into Working For Free (theregister.co.uk) 102
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.
Was his name... (Score:4, Funny)
Tom Sawyer?
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This is less fun than previously indicated!
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Mean, mean pride.
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Linus Torvalds.
Bad reporting (Score:5, Insightful)
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'?
Re:Bad reporting (Score:4, Informative)
If they kept working after seeing the forged wire transfer, then they were also tricked into working for free. It really can be both.
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If they kept working after seeing the forged wire transfer, then they were also tricked into working for free. It really can be both.
Eh, once upon a time I had a series of contracts where each one ended with a substantial unpaid amount owed to me. It didn't just start out with non-payment, initially they paid on time, then they got a little behind, then it became a bit to-do to get money out of them because they couldn't meet all their payments. That usually took many months, so, yeah, I could have immediately gotten all huffy and walked, but that would be trading a known work situation with a fuzzy payment situation for an unknown wor
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True, but this was a startup in question, and they are notoriously bad about paying and there is virtually no chance in hell you will get super rich at a startup (though people are tricked into thinking this). It's also a startup with a stupid concept, which does virtually the same thing as 20 other startups with the same stupid concept. If you're not being paid then you lose *nothing* by leaving.
Re:Bad reporting (Score:4)
gurps_nps is not claiming that the title is false, but rather that it is weakly descriptive of the story.
If the title were "Isaac Choi is the founder and CEO of WrkRiot" that would also be true, but even less descriptive of what happened.
At title that states that Choi committed wire fraud on the payroll contains enough information to let the reader know that people didn't get paid, the mechanism by which that happened, that it was a crime, and that the employees have standing to seek civil redress from Choi. Using "tricked" leave the reader wondering if the outcome is "too bad; so sad".
Words mean things.
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Would you be okay with calling it 'deceiving into working for free'?
Re:Bad reporting (Score:4, Insightful)
No. When you say working for free it means they knew they would not get money, something that implies they are really stupid.
At the time they were working, they thought they would be paid. They did NOT work for free, they worked for money that was not paid. They were tricked into believing they were paid, they were not tricked into working for free.
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No, they worked without being paid. Not the same thing. Just like stealing is not the same thing as getting something for free.
The Tom Sawyer story is about tricking his friends into working for free. If he had lied and said there was a lot of apple pie coming later and that turned out to be false, then that would make a completely different story and turns Tom from a clever boy into a rotten brat.
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Tricked into working for free, or working for substantially less than market rates, is standard startup behavior. Convince the mark that lots of money is coming later, that the options are at least the equivalent of cash, tell them that it's standard practice to work 80 hours a week for low pay.
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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.
And since they were not paid for work that they did (presumably because the company told them they would be getting paid), they were tricked into working for free.
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If you consider Slashdot to be reporting. TFA does have a much better headline.
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True, "Tricked into working for free" sounds like an unusual case, worth a brief read. "Company commits fraud against its workers" is a more straight forward crime story, and boring because it happens too often.
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"What person felt the need to downgrade the horrible crime of wire fraud into merely 'tricking'?"
Apparently just about any /. editor
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What person felt the need to downgrade the horrible crime of wire fraud into merely 'tricking'?
Someone who is contemplating taking a leap into the pharma business after failing in Silicon Valley.
silly valley (Score:2)
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Come on. It is a free society with full freedom of expression. Lying is his fundamental right, and he exercised it. If his employees were foolish enough to believe his lies, it is their fault right? Why should he be indicted? You don't see Trump supporters suing Trump for lying. What's good enough for Trumpsters is good enough for techies.
I know very few people on ./ RTFA, but you should at least read the summary. The company forged confirmation of wire transfers that never occurred. It was not a case of the company convincing people to work for free (a la Tom Sawyer).
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It's a free market issue, the government should keep out of organized crime syndicates as it's bad for these small business owners.
Re:Why is he being persecuted? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why is he being persecuted? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I'd agree with everything you said but would add: Garnish all future wages of his until his payments to the employees are fully paid back with interest. He can keep minimum wage to live off of, but anything more than that goes to a fund that pays back the employees.
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It's cute that you think stealing another's labor is civilized.
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Well it does fall under the definition of standard business practices.
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I disagree. I don't want scum like that changing my bedpans or corrupting my shit with his presence.
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So...Trump ignoring his contractual obligations to pay people and then suing them into submission if they argued, after the work was completed, is not the same as this lowlife scum? As a businessman who has been on people trying to skip out on payments and having been on the losing end of a "bankruptcy of convenience" I say bullshit. Lock. Them. Up.
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Oh please. His own deputy press secretary told us just yesterday that she can definitively say the president is not a liar. So no lawsuit.
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Did she pinky swear?
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Re:American Bedtime Story (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:American Bedtime Story (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Well wait a minute (Score:2)
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Why did you qualify that with a question mark. Without that, it's a statement that your boss does not trick you into unpaid overtime. The addition of the question mark means that it is not a statement. Which suggests to me that you're not sure if your boss tricks you into unpaid overtime or not.
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There's some truth to that, but being on a salary is very different from fabricating fraudulent payment documents.
Screwing with my paycheck is a very bad idea... (Score:2)
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8) Content creation and the DMCA
I didn't start that one but I did finish it.
Seriously, just stop fucking posting. Nobody cares about your anecdotes.
You do.
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Yeah, totally worth it, champ.
All six user accounts.
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What'd that reduce your effective hourly rate to, again?
You're asking for the wrong metric.
How many user accounts got deleted for wasting everyone's time for the last two weeks?
Five (correction to my previous comment): cdreimer, criemer, creinner, cremier and fakefuck39.
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None. Because
1) You don't know what everyone does with their time.
2) It was very funny.
FakeFuck39 confessed [slashdot.org] to being behind criemer, creinner and cremier, which was instrumental in getting the account deleted (note the placeholder name for the username). An AC in the same thread confessed to being cdreimer.
https://slashdot.org/~cdreimer [slashdot.org]
https://slashdot.org/~criemer [slashdot.org]
https://slashdot.org/~creinner [slashdot.org]
https://slashdot.org/~cremier [slashdot.org]
https://slashdot.org/~fakefuck... [slashdot.org]
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[...] much less spend hours frantically pestering website operators for NO pay, in the vain hopes that they'll assist me in protecting my "copyrights."
I've spent 30 minutes on the DMCA takedown notices. More than half of the picture have been taken down. The others will follow shortly.
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You do work for cheap though. Visa workers cost more than 50k a year on the west coast.
Visa workers don't do short-term IT contracts that last from four hours to one year.
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No matter how you slice it, you're getting paid worse than a disposable helpdesk monkey, and you seem to think that's a badge of honor.
That's funny. I created a ticket for a disposable helpdesk monkey to go update a handful of system yesterday. This morning I double checked the work, found one system without the patch, and sent the disposable helpdesk monkey out again. If I'm making less money than disposable helpdesk monkey, why is the disposable helpdesk monkey dancing to my music box?
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Narcissistic personality disorder.
You're confusing me with Trump.
Your childhood must have been terrible.
You think?
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You once made a comment about everyone else's parent's doing drugs.
Coffee, cigarettes, and premarital/extramarital sex. All very, very bad. What you expect from the 1970's?
The way you are today is a defense reaction to your childhood. And everyone can see it.
ROFL
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Are you a Mormon? Or some other kind of religious demented fanatic?
My family were good examples at being bad examples in life. Becoming a Christian in college and moving out of the house was my escape.
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But keeping celibate surely has nothing to do with Jesus, but more what you look like?
Being celibate is a deliberate decision on how you live your life. It doesn't happen by default.
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How could you know what happens "by default" when you've never had sex?
I had a pair of parakeets when I was a teenager. One day my aunt came into my room, saw the birds on the curtain rod and asked me what they were doing. I took a look over my shoulder and said, "They're screwing around."
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And by your own admission, he's paid more than you.
Nope.
And by your own admission, he's still making more than you.
Nope.
Because you're a dispatcher.
I was a dispatcher ten years ago when I worked at Google. I'm not talking about then. I'm talking about today.
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He rode to school on the short bus. Give the dude a little credit. Even though he claims to not be a genuine 'tard, reading his posts, he clearly has some challenges.
There are people for who paying their own way through life is a major accomplishment. My first job was in a restaurant kitchen with a seriously retarded guy. He never complained and worked hard.
On the virtues of ignoring ACs (Score:2)
I disagree with you more often than not. I probably don't like you much either. However, I have noticed a lot of people trolling you, and you have generally responded in more or less civil terms. I'm not sure I would respond as well in the same circumstances. Do keep ignoring any AC suggestions to stop posting, you're okay in my book.
Wire fraud. (Score:2)
The crime he committed was wire fraud against his employees. I believe that we're all hoping they give this Isaac Choi fellow each and every moment he's earned in prison.
Startup reality distortion bubble (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 it is simply that they are used to it. My wife used to work for a small business that did payroll processing for other small businesses. Very often those business would barely have enough money in their accounts to cover the payroll each week (if at all). Since small businesses are very susceptible to fluctuations in revenue, being short on a check could be a somewhat common occurrence. And when the job market is bad enough a job that sometimes pays late is still better than no job at al
Re:Startup reality distortion bubble (Score:4, Interesting)
If your employer can't make payroll, even one day late, and you are not actively looking, you are a fool.
I took work (and company assets) home, the only time this ever happened to me. That company eventually paid and never even knew the assets had left the building (as I brought them back after I got paid).
On the flip side, I knew a mechanic who was unfortunate enough to be on his day off when the IRS showed up and locked down his employer's facility. He was eventually charged with 'grand theft' for using his keys to enter and retrieve his own toolbox full of tools. Didn't even break the cop seal, but they claimed he saw it on the front door. Eventually walked, but the shyster bills were brutal.
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CEO's will often use this strategy to manipulate people and then when things do go belly up, it's the emp
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God damn, I've seen that.
A friend of mine was the only person to make a _penny_ on 'Health Hero Network' stock. Because I talked him into unloading his options at the end of one of his 'that stupid frog is so fucking clueless' rants about his boss.
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It's absolutely true, and everybody knows somebody who jumped ship right before things really took off. It's one thing to prattle on about sunk costs and level headed moves, but when you're in a situation where laving your job today guarantees no paycheck next week, and staying offers a glimmer of hope of not only next week's paycheck but the paychecks owed from last month it's (psychologically) hard to cut that life line. Doubly so if you actually believe in the company and what they are doing.
CEOs prey on