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“Startup Robs Every Customer They Have for Thousands of Dollars Overnight”
- spectramax 8y agoWhat is “the startup” in this case? What is preventing from disclosing the name of the business?
- djflutt3rshy 8y agoReddit's rules against giving out personal information, so thousands of Redditors don't bombard the startup with angry comments or worse.
- chippy 8y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/wiki/index#wiki_general_rules https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/wiki/index#wiki_general... subreddit rules
- Animats 8y agoHomeshare fits the description.[1] Not finding any other articles which mention this problem, though. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/homeshare-rents-luxury-apartments-at-affordable-prices-2018-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/homeshare-rents-luxury-apart...
- daguar 8y agoTwitter user complaining with a story that appears to match the Reddit description: https://mobile.twitter.com/aCUBEDtv/status/1112785910335041536 https://mobile.twitter.com/aCUBEDtv/status/11127859103350415...
- rurban 8y agoThey have 3 investors in the first and only round: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/homeshare#section-investors https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/homeshare#section-in...
- Animats 8y agoHow did they manage to lose money in that business? They get paid up front, so they don't have a cash flow problem. They don't have much of an investment. There's plenty of demand. What went wrong?
- netsharc 8y agoIt's a startup, so they probably have 20 developers and 5 business majors who are "C-levels", each getting 6 digit salaries... As someone asked somewhere, "Why does Twitter need hundreds of developers? It's basically a CRUD interface."
- egypturnash 8y agoWhat Twitter - or any large social media site - needs is a large, well-paid abuse team. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people. That'd blow through a bunch of money.
- tedunangst 8y agoToo large sales team? Or community outreach ambassadors or whatever we call them these days. The business model as I understand it is they pay for any missing roommates rent until the spot is filled? Maybe they had a fragmentation problem? 30 people move into 10 rooms, 10 people move out, negative 30% income.
- daguar 8y agoGoogling the basic contours of this shows the company pretty quickly. There are users on Twitter sharing similar stories.
- TheRealPomax 8y agoMostly "wanting to use the law". You can disclose that information if you want, but you really don't want to, because you give up any legal power you might have had if you do. If you rile up a mob (and an internet mob certainly counts), even if you don't do so directly but let "the comment section figure it out", and then don't get that content moderated, you lose whatever legal standing you might have had if the courts need to become involved. Any lawsuit you file will get thrown out immediately. Which is why on Reddit the mods will aggressively redact any attempt to identify legal parties. You might want to name and shame, but that is a destructive desire.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- brianpgordon 8y agoWhat bizarro world are you living in where failing to moderate a Reddit thread causes you to lose standing? At worst you won't be able to get as good a settlement because the scammer can't pay you extra to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
- TheRealPomax 8y agoSame one you live in. By not moderating a conversation you started, and instead of locking it down, allowing people to name parties and stand by while the internet mob takes shape, you are absolutely going to lose standing, and a competent lawyer will be entirely able to argue you counted on that happening.
- jhfdbkofdcho 8y agoSounds like a hi tech version of a scam in my city where a guy rents an apartment (or just squats it) and then turns around and sublets it and stops paying rent to the actual owner. People actually living in the unit stuck holding the bag.
- dmix 8y agoSubletting is entirely legal is it not? And it’s not a free ticket to do whatever you want with the property either.
- larkeith 8y ago> and stops paying rent to the actual owner The idea is they take the sublessee's deposit and first rent payment, don't pay the owner the rent, and vanish. The sublessee has now payed deposit + rent but has nowhere to live (as the landlord is unpaid).
- dmix 8y agoRight. That’s different, I misread. This happened to my relative when someone owed her $9000 in rent. We were able to retrieve most of it via small claims court. It also helped he was dumb enough to leave bank papers behind when he was evicted so it made the process easier. A credit agency is handling the rest.
- jhfdbkofdcho 8y agohttps://www.citypaper.com/bcp-cms-1-1034317-migrated-story-cp-20100929-mobs-20100929-story.html https://www.citypaper.com/bcp-cms-1-1034317-migrated-story-c...
- cimmanom 8y agoWhether subletting is permitted depends on the terms of the lease (and in some cases policies of a homeowners association or coop board).
- jwhitlark 8y ago
- idlewords 8y agoA venture-funded startup for putting up $1500 living room dividers that manages to run at a loss may be peak San Francisco.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Gibbon1 8y agoI was thinking recently about Triplebyte which is paying to spam every public webpage I visit. Far as I can tell they're basically Barbizon modeling school for tech bro's.
- garry 8y agoActually Triplebyte has been getting jobs for good hackers without credentials. That’s the opposite of what you are thinking: tech bros are from central casting and have high powered CS degrees. Many Triplebyte alums have no degree or no formal CS training yet the test shows they are among the top software engineers in the world and deserve high salaried jobs.
- Gibbon1 8y agoKeep believing if that works for you.
- gok 8y agoWhat the fuck is the manager of a leasing office of a luxury apartment building doing posting on r/LegalAdvice?
- TeMPOraL 8y agoAsking for legal advice, obviously.
- jtms 8y agoWhy shouldn’t they?
- gok 8y agoA large property management company should have their own lawyers, potentially in-house. This whole post sounds like they're trying to drum up support, not actually ask for legal advice.
- oceliker 8y agoJudging by the last couple sentences, I think they’re posting on behalf of the residents, who wouldn’t get much help from the company.
- bengale 8y agoDo you have a deposit protection scheme like we have the the UK? Our refundable deposits don't sit with the landlord or letting agent, they go to a separate company. At the end they release the funds unless there is some sort of damage in which case they investigate and decide whats a fair payment to the landlord.
- Kalium 8y agoThis varies by state. I know at least some states do.
- oceanghost 8y agoAt least in California, no. My experience has always been the landlord makes up any excuse at all to keep the deposit and you fight them tooth and nail. California does have a fair number of renter protection laws, but the companies rarely observe them.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoMy experience in California has been that the landlord didn't try to keep the deposit even when the rental contract arguably allowed them to.
- tialaramex 8y agoLike a lot of such mechanisms this does have a flaw that it's not really useful for the most vulnerable people. When someone like me gets screwed by a landlord (back before I bought somewhere outright) they can invoke the protection mechanism and even threaten to go to court, but when somebody who struggles every month to find rent gets screwed this way they're focused on how they'll afford food, they don't have the time or money to fight. Historically a lot of those people rented from their local government and so not mistreating them was a matter of government policy, subject to oversight by voters like me who certainly do have time and money. But these days it's likely to be whoever has the cheapest private rent offers. Local governments have been defunded so much they may not even have anybody left to even enforce licensing rules, so crooks who shouldn't even legally be letting properties can steal with impunity. Courts try to help. If you get to court. But most of these vulnerable people never will.
- oooshha 8y ago"Lightspeed Venture Partners and Mucker Capital " guys might want to sort this out, the founder doesn't seem worried bout his rep but I'm sure those VCs are.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bthomas 8y agoWhat’s the rationale for not naming them here?
- CaliforniaKarl 8y agoProbably General Rule 10 and Posting Rule 3 from https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/wiki/index#wiki_general_rules https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/wiki/index#wiki_general... Edit: To clarify, I’m talking about naming them in the Reddit post. There’s already another set of comments here trying to figure out who they are.
- bloopernova 8y agoReddit users are like a swarm of zombies sometimes. If something negative gets shared about a person or company, you can be fairly certain that there will be hundreds to tens of thousands of Redditors expressing their anger. That anger, whether deserved or not, results in everything from DDOS attacks, phonecalls from thousands of people, people contacting employees at home, death threats, etc etc. There's also the tale of the Boston Marathon bombing, where some "over-enthusiastic" Reddit users took it upon themselves to solve the crimes based on footage from security cameras. The Reddit Detectives managed to hound and accuse the wrong people: https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-falsely-accuses-sunil-tripathi-of-boston-bombing-2013-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-falsely-accuses-sunil... So Reddit is very anxious to avoid unleashing the zombie horde again, hence its very strict policies about naming companies or individuals.
- i4blux 8y agoCalling those who did the Boston Marathon detective work "Reddit" is like calling those who hailed the NZ mosque shooter "4chan".
- baking 8y agoI think it is worse than that. I was actually actively involved in the process of looking through those photos on /r/Boston at the time and the whole "red herring" story was not organic to that process and just seemed to be something that an outside group of trolls (maybe outside of Reddit or outside of r/Boston) decided to bandwagon and got it picked up by the media. Nobody really involved in the process really bought into it. I always feel like the "internet detectives" got a bad rap. Maybe the lesson to be learned is that the media needs to know what they are dealing with before going with the "Reddit says" storyline.
- CaliforniaKarl 8y agoIn general, I understand and support the idea that, should your startup not go well, you fail, wrap things up, and move on. It's too big of a risk to stake your entire life on one venture, and my understanding is that VC firms, angels, and the like all understand that this can happen when they invest in a startup. That risk is not something that is understood by most end users, where in this case "end users" includes landlords and other people "on the ground". Those people made an agreement with the startup in good faith, and I contend that faith has been violated, to the potential financial ruination of (at least) a subset of the tenants, and possibly (depending on their financial position) a fair subset of the landlords. (It's worth noting the Reddit post was made about a day ago. In my rental agreement, for example, I would now be in violation for failing to pay rent to the landlord. I expect many of the tenants are now in that same position.) I contend that you should not be allowing things like this to be precipitated. Yes, I'm looking at you, YC. Yes, I'm looking at you, A16Z. And all of the other VC organizations, _and their alumni networks_. With this case serving as an example, I think you have a self-policing problem. You might say something along the lines of "Oh, it [the startup] wasn't affiliated with any of us", or "Oh, that 'VC' isn't an actual VC", or "Oh, we didn't know them". In an instance like this, I don't think that matters. What matters is two things: 1. If not illegal, I contend that the actions of the startup (and maybe the VC) were at least highly immoral. 2. From the landlord's perspective, they see this as a startup and a VC. Maybe that's not what they actually were, but that doesn't matter. For this point, it doesn't matter what the reality was, it matters what the perception _is_. I suggest two actions: 1. You (the same collective 'you' as above) should immediately reach out to the poster, to learn both about their tenants and to get in contact with the representative that the landlord was working with. You should then use that contact to identify other landlords where this has happened. Make the tenants whole through at least April, if not April and May. 2. Create a framework to prevent things like this from happening. I admit that I'm being _way_ to vague here, but that is because I do not have enough expertise in what you do, to make a concrete suggestion. Instead, I am calling out the problem, so that you can use your knowledge and experience to formulate a solution. For example, many of you have talked about—or otherwise targeted—basic income. Why not tackle this first.
- icebraining 8y ago
- stuart78 8y agoI realize intimately how hard it is to get by in SF and other big cities, so I won’t criticize the renters here, but I have no such hesitation about criticizing the founding team and investors. Turning apartments into tenements could never have turned out well. How does this business scale outside of the core nimby tech cities? And even in those cities, the decentralization of the market is both good and hard to take down. One hopes those responsible are compelled to do so, but one also fears it will just be the renters left twisting.
- icebraining 8y agoHouse prices are getting pretty high on cities all over the world; there's plenty of market if they were willing to go global. The concept in itself doesn't seem to be obviously broken to me.
- landryraccoon 8y agoWhat’s broken is resorting to massive investment in hacky, brittle technological solutions to a policy problem that needs a political solution to address the root causes. IMHO we live in an age where maybe some more smart people should be turning their minds towards affecting public policy.
- asperous 8y agoArchives: https://web.archive.org/web/20190406050632/https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/b9vk9g/san_francisco_based_startup_robs_every_customer/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190406050632/https://www.reddi... https://archive.fo/V3vsK https://archive.fo/V3vsK