Comment by bgribble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bgribble | Hacker News Reader

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When a less-powerful entity owes a more-powerful entity money, the debt obligation works to ensure that they get their money back. Like when you owe a bank money.

When the more-powerful owes money to the less-powerful, the debt obligation works to ensure that the less-powerful person's choices are limited to "walk away from my money" or "wait around and hope". When someone says they are going to pay you, you really really want to believe.

Funny how the debt obligation always works in the more-powerful party's favor :(

I have had a very similar situation happen twice, once when a VC gave a small startup the "check is in the mail... no wait we have to transfer money.. no wait we have to liquidate an investment" BS while the employees worked without pay for months on end. My first startup job, and the LAST time I will work for any amount of time without getting paid.

The second time (different company) the founder/VC (allegedly) defrauded the other investors by puffing up the startup's prospects, and then when the startup got acquired by ${BIGCO} for a very very low valuation only the founder walked away with any money... he was indicted, I think, I had to produce years worth of email for trial discovery and was lucky not to have to testify.

In my experience, working for a messed-up/sketchy startup is just a resume item that most people have, and you hope you only have one of...

>Funny how the debt obligation always works in the more-powerful party's favor :(

When you take a very critical view of the law, not just as written, but how it works in practice, you see the same appear constantly throughout all parts of our system.

When you are charged with a crime, even if you can prove your innocence, generally your day to day life suffers great harm that can be considered a punishment for daring to do what ever got you charged with the crime in the first place. But for someone (or some entity) who has access to the best lawyers, their day to day lives suffer by only a faction.

An accused poor individual can easily lose access to their money flow (they are fired for being in jail waiting for bail). A rich individual does not lose their money and has lawyers to significantly reduce the wait time. They are also treated better in general because they have the power to cause harm to those enforcing/making the law if they want (donating to an opposing candidate, buying commercials, etc.).

>The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

-Anatole France

> When you are charged with a crime, even if you can prove your innocence, generally your day to day life suffers great harm that can be considered a punishment for daring to do what ever got you charged with the crime in the first place.

Or for daring to do nothing at all, in the case of mistaken identity or a straight frame job. I mention this out only to say your points here are correct, but the situation is actually much worse than you portray.

This is a reasonable summary, but I still don't understand the specific behavior in this case.

Stonewalling and lying are often effective for whoever's in power. Giving clear, easily-falsified evidence to everyone you're crossing still doesn't - as evidenced by the fact that lots of startups fail to pay, but this one is leading to a prosecution.

Allegedly forged wire transfer confirmations that were done in Photoshop is what crossed the line towards prosecution for wire fraud. Excuses and stalling isn't the same thing.

Yeah, that's what confused me. Delaying tactics wouldn't have been shocking, but actual fraud seems like an enormous risk for virtually no payoff.

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