'Tech entrepreneur took our money but failed to deliver our startup dreams'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> "he "bragged" about living at the Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Abu Dhabi, boasted about renting a villa in Bali, and showed off a newly purchased Porsche 911 and multiple speeding fines"
Ironically, many of his victims appear to be average people who have invested their personal savings (one actually remortgaging her house) in a website/app idea.
These agencies usually don’t have lawyers, so new contracts are full of exploitable holes. You say “we’ll build an e-commerce app with inventory management”, without specifying exactly what inventory management means, your client will start experimenting on your dime and can easily make it seem like it’s your fault. The larger the client, the worse this becomes.
You should always, always make your contracts as specific as possible, but this requires consulting work to nail down requirements before a contract is finalized, and that has a cost, but clients don’t value this and want you “the expert” to magically fill in the blanks in their ideas like an LLM, for free.
Another issue is your team. You might be very competent, but your team might not, hiring is hard. I once had to fire half of my team and build a 6 month client project in 1 month at great cost to my work / life balance because they were just unable to make meaningful progress. Granted, my leadership was not top notch there (being too busy to check on progress and trusting standups is a bad strategy) and I learned a lot, adjusted accordingly.
These are a few counter examples, but I still believe if this is a pattern then you’re a crook.
> Customers who say they spent their life savings without receiving a viable product - they told the BBC they received products from ConvrtX which didn't work or match what they had paid for
An MVP would have sufficed, though they couldn’t be bothered to at least do that. Of course, they should have also said no to the downright unreasonable ideas that some of the customers had for their budget (e.g. accessing all of the phone data remotely, on a startup budget).
But it’s pretty obvious that they had no love for the craft nor even the most basic respect for their customers and just cared about the money.
In the misfortune of our best friends, we often find something that is not displeasing.
My guess is definitely not.
As a software developer (who did contract work in the past). I think this is actually sound logic within certain parameters... Sometimes clients do ask for impossible or infeasible things. But in most cases, the constraints are money and skills. Someone who is good at sales should not have to reject clients because something is difficult. There are plenty of skilled software devs who are looking for opportunities. It's just unfortunate that talent discovery is broken and sales people cannot find technical people who are capable of delivering working products.
In theory there isn't anything wrong with promising something you don't have but which you know you can access through the markets. The real problem occurs when you think you can access something through the markets but, really, you can't because that particular market is dysfunctional.
IMO, the software developer market is highly dysfunctional. There are people straight out of university who know nothing and can't deliver anything on their own earning over $200k per year and seasoned experts who can deliver anything barely earning 100k.
What does that even mean, honestly? Because I would argue that a salesperson who doesn’t accurately represent the product or service they’re selling is a conman, and I think there is a fair bit of established law on the subject.
FWIW, reading the article on that app, it did not sound particular awe-inspiring ( though kinda useful ) so it does not sound like level of technical challenge was the issue here.
On the other hand, I think most reasonable people would agree that a lot of problems facing most businesses are exactly that dramatic. They might not be easy and the customer may not even know exactly what they want, which adds a level of spice into the mix, but are not in the impossible category.
I reiterate my previous position that the salesman should know what his team can actually do. Then again, so should the customer. Some yonks ago, we had a team present their product to our executives. Because of the nature of the product, a lot of it could ( had to ) be customized. The executives saw pretty charts of a potential future product, but somehow failed to understand the effort needed to get to that point since those pretty charts relied on a whole bunch of little things happening in the background. And I think we would agree that data visualization can be fun, challenging and interesting, but it is not exactly rocket science.
Almost inevitably, after a lot of delays and aggravation, the product rolled out with quarter of the promised features and no charts ( well, no reports, charts were technically there ). Whose fault is that? Was it salesmen, because they promised what genuinely could be?
Sadly, there is a lot of blame to go around, and while I saw some train wrecks in my career, I think my biggest pet peeve now is clear lack of preparation. The sheer amount of projects that had either no requirements or ridiculously broad requirements is enough to make me wonder how anything gets done.
Hell, two projects ago, I was forced to work with a vendor with no agreed requirements in place ( and it wasn't some data recording app like in the article, but enterprise level idiocy ). And when things inevitably went sideways, because where can they possibly go if there is no plan for something this big, I got to spend every god damn day in daily 'war room' going over minute details effectively doing the scoping that should have been waaaaaaay back when.
In my model of the world, there is exactly one country in the world that values skilled labor, the US. The highly skilled 100k people from abroad are firewalled from it by the visa regime and the fact that most people with money have IQ too low to effectively work remotely (so they have to work in person to be able to assess the vibes of a person using their lizard brain).
The 200k kids are from good families (hence psychologically stable) joining established orgs where the important thing is to be a good cog shapeable into a decent engineer rather than just the ability to deliver.
Glad that this is possible in the UK. There are a ton of folks in Dubai itself who have fallen to similar scams, but they have had no reprieve from their banks (most of which are actually all too happy to facilitate those scams).
Of course the victims might have transferred to an account the scammer has in the UK
Is there any requirement of diligence, or can you basically jump on any "100% profit in 3 weeks" scam and get (most of) the money back when it doesn't work out?
There is a requirement for diligence, but this requires not being "grossly negligent". Even this is waived for people classed as vulnerable (I do not know exactly what that means).
The first time I transferred money to an overseas account in my name, the bank blocked the transfer for a day until I gave them proof that I was the owner of the account, what I was doing with the money and that I wasn’t being scammed.
https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/what-to-do-if...
It has made banks very nervous about transfers as even payments to a legitimate business can be part of a a fraud (e.g. buy gold and hand it over to the fraudster for "safe keeping") and people have complained they have had problems making legitimate transfers.
This should be a matter for business insurance.
I doubt insurance covers this sort of thing though.
ti is quite annoying getting "is this a fraud?" warnings on every transfer - even small amounts to my kids!
It is likely to come up a lot with private sales. Banks are unlikely to let the seller deposit cash (because of money laundering rules), so if they do not allow a payment by transfer its going to become impossible.
They can't force transaction reversals or clawbanks. They actually force the bank to take the hit.
Is this an example of a scam or a legit app? Sounds nice but not profitable.
Example for Birmingham: https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/info/50163/library_services/15...
It's a shame they got swindled, but the company had totally unrealistic proposals. I bet these people scoffed at quotes from legitimate shops. How so many people will invest their life savings without doing much research is astonishing.
These are the same people who will now pay for AI slop.
Now you don't need to pay huge sums of money to these consultant grifters any more as now AI tools like Cursor, Windsurf, Devin, Bolt, Lovable and Replit can build these apps and websites for you almost for free.
I nearly signed off a six figure deal for someone to make an app for us and we instead went down the AI tools route after some evaluation and prototyping and we saved a lot of money on this to get it built.
This was very sad to read and I wish these people found these tools at all or even sooner rather than plowing their money into scammers.
If a scammer wants to, they can flee from all repercussions without building anything, even if all the AI tools were available to them. While Josh Adler is just one person, there are multiple such people in Dubai who've done the same to thousands of victims. Dubai is notorious for attracting those types.
Yes, many things can do rapid prototyping, especially for CRUD apps. And yes, professional programmers can go very fast with the right tech. Unfortunately in most cases, programmers use what they know, because discovering the tool that already does 99% of what you’re customer needs is already a lot of work.
So people who are out of the loop clearly won’t know about Bolt or Claude.
If you don’t know how to do it, you don’t know how to do it. Learn how to do it.
Half the early startup code I’ve seen delivered by agencies can best be described as performance art.
At least with AI delivered code the most likely output is some middle of the road boilerplate.
I have not seen an example of anything that should cost six figures done by traditional development done using AI tools.