Help me plan revenge

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Well, I’ve never been a vengeful person before, but I hope you’ll agree that in this case it is warranted.

I own a small software company with my wife. Over the years we’ve been very successful at making great products and winning big awards, but never very good at selling our stuff. Around November of last year, sales were down due to the economy, we had downsized from twelve employees to seven, and were looking for strategies to ride out the bad times. Then, out of the blue, a knight in shining armor appeared. He had read an article about us in a local newspaper and wanted to help us out. He was a retired sales exec and had worked for several very big software companies. We were immediately impressed with his ideas, and strategies for increasing our sales, and we agreed to let him help us, paying him solely on commission.

Within a month, he had two possible sales lined up, each around a million dollars. He had talked to the companies, he had visited their head offices (we had paid his expenses) and they were enthusiastic. To go forward, we needed a detailed proposal for each and a working prototype for one of them, In total, we probably poured about 11 person-months into supporting these sales. They looked promising enough that we decided to abandon our other survival strategies in order to do our best to ensure these contracts. That is about when our new sales guy was arrested.

Apparently in 2001, he became a sales rep for a company in Boston, racked up several milllion in sales, and collected his $150,000 in commission before they discovered that he had faked everything, including a signed contract from the customer.

While he was in jail, awaiting arraignment, we started pulling the threads of these two contracts for us. It turns out that both of these were completely bogus too.

Last monday we had to lay off all of our employees. We are shutting down everything except the sales department, in hopes that we can pay off some of the debt in residual sales, but things look prett bleak.

What really gets to me, though, is that he didn’t have much to gain from us. We were struggling when he came to us, we couldn’t pay his commision until the cheques cleared, even if we’d wanted to. He got maybe $2500 in travel expenses out of us, but we know he went on those trips so he couldn’t have kept that cash. Yet he put us in the position of wasting $50,000 in salaries to support fake contracts. One of our employees had to repeatedly change plans for his wedding to working in the changing timeline of this imaginary contract.

And now I want to hurt him.

I spoke to the local police fraud unit about whether this can be persued as a criminal case, but other than our testimony, we don’t have much to nail him with. His emails were all sufficiently vague. All the big lies he told us, he told us verbally. we don’t have the money to persue a civil case against him, and I don’t think he has many assets for us to win.

He is facing jail time in this other case, and the Mass. State attorney has indicated that if convicted, he may get a longer sentence because of what he did to us. But this guy essentially destroyed a very cool, very promising company that my wife and I have poured ten years of our lives into.

I don’t want to do anything illegal, this is not worth going to jail over, but this anger I feel towards him demands something.

2

I cannot believe the nerve of this jerk! Why are some people such assholes? I can offer nothing but sympathy and the hopes that somehow, you won’t lose your company. It’s horrible and sad that the world if full of people who con for a living. I wish you true karmic justice in this situation.

3

Don’t waste any time and energy trying to hurt him. There is no upside to that. Yes, he’s an asshole and was conning you, but he got caught and will pay for it. Let that be enough.

I get the impression you are letting your anger at him blind you to what really happened. There are important lessons here, and if you just focus on what he did wrong you won’t learn them, setting yourself up to be conned again.

You do recognize you were conned right? And you know how that happened so you won’t fall for the same BS from someone else?

My guess is you are a techie at heart and were thrilled to find a ‘knight in shining armour’ who would handle all the sales stuff and let you focus on developing the product. That’s not the right way to run your business though.

You should have at least contacted the potential customers yourself, before commiting so much of your resources to them. You can’t relinquish all sales aspects to another person in favour of spending your time on the more interesting (to you) aspects. If you don’t realize that now, you are just ripe to be conned again.

4

I think Lionel is on the right track with this one. What the “salesman” did is completely despicable, but since he is being prosecuted already, the best revenge you could have on him is to find a way to pull your company out of this. This seems to be a case of cut your losses, survey the damage, and try to get something out of the wreckage. I assume you’re talking to people about your business that will help you make the most out of what’s left (bankruptcy consultants, etc.). You and your wife are ten years further down the line, but you’re still healthy and able to work, right? So in spite of not wanting to, and the shittiness of having to, you can start all over again without making the same mistakes as last time.

Just out of curiosity, did his references all check out when you hired him?

5

From your intro it’s unclear whether he destroyed your company or just made you fail faster. If you’re still dog paddling to stay afloat after 10 years you really need to ask yourself about your core strategies. Dumping that number of man hours into big deals that you did not actively confirm the validity of until after the fact, starts to move from you the category of being abused by a con artist and into the category of being a somewhat foolish business person.

Re revenge a detailed letter to the Judge prior to sentencing might be useful.

6

That would be the logical thing to do of course.

oh, no. not at all. I have learned plenty of lessons from this.

I recognize that we were conned, but it was a con that made no sense, which is why it worked. He got nothin out of us, but damaged so much.

All he handlled was these two sales. Otherwise, we kept on as we had been

We had some contact with them, and things looked legit.

7

Yep, he has had legitimate business in the past, and these are what he gave us. All his other crimes either predated the internet and didn’t show up under google, or were still under a sealed indictment.

8

We have been doing well for most of those ten years, thank you very much.

The entire sector has taken a walloping in the last two years though. Many of our competitors and distributors have gone out of business. We had a plan for riding out the rough times that most likely would have worked, but was not a guaranteed thing.

Thanks for that, but until you’ve been through the same thing, try not to pass judgment. There were many signs that this whole thing was on the up and up, and believe me, we did agonize over it, and we did have some contact with the customer. In retrospect, it did not actually confirm anything. It just looked like it did. This guy was good, and he conned large companies with much larger resources than us.

But the biggest thing that convinced us that it was real was that he had nothing to gain from it. And I still don’t understand what the hell he was up to.

9

I apologize, I was being tactless. Hindsight is 20-20. Sometimes I sell businesses, and I have seen of number of these situations where a thief or con man can wreck a business because the owner held them in trust.

As to what he was doing small timing it (re the dollars in the scam for him) with your situation is fairly typical con man behavior, where they will lay a bit low after a big hit until they can formulate the next big scam. He was going to use his credibility as your employee or agent to leverage something out of a bigger fish. He just got caught before he could make his move.

10

Apology accepted.

But yes, this is the only thing we could figure, was that he was going to use our reputation and credibility to con someone else.

11

Well, sonuvabitch. How’s anyone supposed to hire anyone if these kind of people can slip under the radar?

12

What a horrible thing to have happen. You have my sympathies.

You may be able to sue him in civil court. I have no idea if you have a case but if you do you should be able to find a lawyer who will take it on contingency. At least explore that option.

Haj