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Comment by philiphodgen | Hacker News Reader

In California this is a criminal offense and the DA for the County where he is will have a bounced check unit. Contact the DA. It is a slam dunk.

Do. Not. Threaten. To. Go. To. The. DA. "I'm going to the DA if you don't pay me" is stoopit. That's blackmail and you will be the one in trouble not him. Just file charges.

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IANAL, but I don't see how this fits the legal definition of blackmail, which, as I understand it, requires that the blackmailer not have a right to the property they are attempting to extort from the victim.

Creditors routinely threaten to report debtors to the credit bureaus -- is that blackmail??

I think if you said "I'm going to the DA if you don't pay me double the amount you owe me", that would be blackmail.

Admittedly, the suggestion to just go ahead and file charges doesn't seem like bad advice to me.

[IANAL] Of course, it's also blackmail to threaten to approach the police about crime B if crime A is not rectified - that A is a crime is irrelevant. Not that it's applicable here.

IANAL, but I have been way too intimately involved in something. There are many types of threats that can be considered criminal harassment, but threatening to call the cops is not one of them (at least in Canada). I presume the same would apply to blackmail. Calling the cops is what you're supposed to do, so threatening to do what you're supposed to do should not be a crime. It might be different if you were trying to collect something that wasn't yours, but...

Another thing I learned was to never accept any sort of repayment scheme. Once you do that, it then becomes a civil matter rather than a criminal matter.

Again, I'm not a lawyer, and this may apply to Canada only.

in another thread thucydides says:

Note that each act separately is fine: you can demand money; you can threaten to report a crime. You just can't make the report conditional on receiving money.

So in essence, you're saying that we're both right.

Thanks. The question is which DA to contact. His company is registered with a San Francisco address while most of his past cases are in Marin County. Also, I'm in NYC.

SF, CA

(Not legal advice, just my opinion)

Not true. It would only be blackmail if he didn't legally owe the money.

Threatening to go to the DA is very appropriate. In fact, it's what you should do so that he knows how serious it is. I would say something like, "If there's not a cashier's check in my hand by x date, I will file criminal charges with the DA."

It would be the polite thing to do, so that he's not blindsided with a criminal record.

It would be the polite thing to do, so that he's not blindsided with a criminal record.

Politeness is not warranted in this situation. This guy sounds like a defacto asshole and deserves to be in jail.

Out of politeness, I told the guy that date x would be the last day I would be available to do any minor fixes or work for him due to continued non-payment.

What does he do? Use that against me to argue that the project didn't really finish until the date in my courtesy email and that he's got another few days to pay me and make good on the returned checks.

Of course his own arbitrary deadline for when payment is due have long come and gone with no payment.

And don't even get me started about the returned checks impact on me financially. My account went from positive ~4k to about -5,900. My checking account is couple weeks from being reported if I don't get in the pos.

I'm bouncing back but wanna do everything possible to keep others from going through the same shit. More on that soon as I launch a site warning others of this.

Not correct. If you threaten to expose a crime unless you are paid money, you have committed blackmail. It is blackmail even if you have a legal right to demand the money.

Note that each act separately is fine: you can demand money; you can threaten to report a crime. You just can't make the report conditional on receiving money.

> If you threaten to expose a crime unless you are paid money, you have committed blackmail.

That might make sense if the crime in question weren't the non-payment of that money. Saying, "If you don't pay what you owe, I'll report you" doesn't sound like it could possibly be blackmail.

There are a lot of IANALs here, I'd love to hear an actual lawyer comment on this.

I'm not quite a lawyer. I represented criminal defendants throughout my third year of law school. I earned my Juris Doctor in May and will hear if I passed the Maryland bar in November.

"I try to unravel the paradox [of blackmail] and provide a coherent basis for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate threats. In brief, I argue that the key to the wrongfulness of the blackmail transaction is its triangular structure. The transaction implicitly involves not only the blackmailer and his victim but always a third party as well. This third party may be, for example, the victim's spouse or employer, the authorities or even the public at large. When a blackmailer tries to use his right to release damaging information, he is threatening to tell others. If the blackmail victim pays the blackmailer, it is to avoid the harm that those others would inflict. Thus blackmail is a way that one person requests something in return for suppressing the actual or potential interests of others. To get what he wants, the blackmailer uses leverage that is less his than someone else's. Selling the right to go to the police involves suppressing the state's interests. Selling the right to tell a tort victim who committed the tort involves suppressing the tort victim's interests. And selling the right to inform others of embarrassing (but legal) behavior involves suppressing the interests of those other people."

James Lindgren, Unraveling the Paradox of Blackmail, 84 Colum. L. Rev. 670, 672 (1984)

That still doesn't quite answer the question: If the money is paid, there is no crime to begin with. The transfer isn't selling the right to go to the authorities, it's resolving the crime of non-payment in the first place.

I am an actual lawyer.

Threats mean you're using the threat of police action (criminal procedures) to gain an advantage in a civil dispute.

Fuck the civil dispute ("You owe me money". "No I don't"). This guy is past that.

Badclient has a criminal beef with the bad guy in SF, in addition to the civil dispute.

Two separate things going on. Civil. Criminal.

Don't mix them up.

Strategically you don't write demand letters. They're a waste of time. I refuse to write them for clients.

Just act. Step 1, the bazooka. (Step 2 is that a judge orders restitution under pain of jail if the bad guy doesn't pay).

So, badclient, tomorrow is Monday. Load your bazooka.

Tips on how to load the bazooka?

It's near impossible getting the SF DA on the phone. My call to NYPD put me in touch with an investigator who insisted I just got conned in one of those work from home schemes. One contact at SF DA told me I should contact NYPD and they'd turn it over to SF. So I guess I should try walking into my local police station with all the documents?

Surely by your definition, any Cease & Desist letter is also blackmail?

No, C+Ds usually contain threats of CIVIL action, not threats to report criminal behavior to the government.

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