The elaborate con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency | Hacker News Reader

The elaborate con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency

bbc.co.uk

43 pointscmsefton18 comments

A "Fake it until you make it" story but "not a single client contract had been signed" how at that scale can "not a single" prospect sign up.

I thought it was this story from 2019: https://www.insider.com/scam-influencers-travel-photographer... (terrible writing warning).

Not sure if this is the same story as above: https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a30992762/hollywood-con-...

I wonder where people draw lines between con and not con.

Seems he didnt make any money from this company.

Obviously, faking employees, company history etc shows his dishonesty / con side of this.

But seems like he could almost make this con happen without being that dishonest. Get a free work from people working on commision to bootstrap his company and start making real money and actually start paying them.

Was this what he was planning? Probably not, but would that still be a con?

>Obviously, faking employees, company history etc shows his dishonesty / con side of this

He also faked past work for 42 clients he never had, contractually promised visas and relocation to London, faked his own education and work history, faked a co-founder, and more.

You could, of course, bootstrap a company via hiring with a commission-only probationary period. But you would have to comply with minimum wage laws and other labor laws if they were actual employees.

Employment involving any intentional misrepresentation is a con.

It's not complicated.

Not getting paid at all of course makes the con more consequential than finding out some of the claimed company background was faked.

We live in scary times. Business used to be partly based on Trust but if people flat-out lie, how can we ever reasonably trust them?

The man can and should be prosecuted for fraud, never mind what people's contracts actually said. The fact that the company is insolvent doesn't remove his liability for fraudulently stealing and lying "for gain"

I didn't really understand from the article how "Ali" made money from the scam. Can anyone shed light on that?

Best guess is that he was trying to parlay others (free/commission) work into a real company by signing design contracts.

Sounds like he didn't make money, but he did convince ~50 people to work on a commission-only basis during a probationary period. Sounds like he started around August 2020.

"But no deals were ever finalised. By February 2021, not a single client contract had been signed. None of the Madbird staff had been paid a penny."

Somewhat interesting that across 50 people, some of whom quit fairly quickly, but others that stayed on...none were able to make a single sale in a 6 month period.

It could well be that the client companies saw enough red flags to decline doing business with them, even though the employees fell for the ongoing deception and the sunk-cost fallacy - it should be noted that this was a time of great uncertainty and certain people would have been loath to walk away from what seemed like a legitimate job when there were few other reasonable options easily available.

What the heck.. give the man a real position! He should do it One More Time but this time for real. That guy is a puppet master! The future is open for that guy

Would you work for him?

It depends on the purpose of company. SEO and ads is not the kind of work I like to do. But, if it's something freaky-visionary, I would accept that guy as founder and company Leader

Good luck!

Well, he did manipulate a lot of people, but with no end result:

"But no deals were ever finalised. By February 2021, not a single client contract had been signed."

Not he did the deals, bit his employees. No one knows why no deal has been signed. No one knows what qualities the employees had. And that don't diminish what the guy did from the marketing perspective and from a company leader view as quite a lot of people fell for his charisma otherwise no one would work for him.

Now imagine this backed by a real company

He appears to have acted illegally in a handful of ways, so unless people are willing to overlook an apparent lack of character and backbone, it seems unlikely an especially positive future is open to him

Have you ever meet a guy/girl who is being able to convince you of doing something and feeling good at it? Even if there is some "illegal"? You have contracts, you can read and decide, you have the possiblity to choose.. etc. (Btw, contracts on provision base are not designed to have a constant income for a living. So everyone signing knew what might happen -> no contract. No money)

Just like Elon, Steve and Bill - that guy has qualities of self marketing, leadership and the proper portion of fun. That's what counts ...

Like a lot of hackers did really bad an got employed due their knowledge by big companies and government - they also seemed unlikely to have a positive future..

Don't see the bad, but what good the bad can do

*captain America

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