No advice here, but an interesting story. A friend of mine was owed about $10K on a contract. He had been working for the company for a couple of months and th

No advice here, but an interesting story. A friend of mine was owed about $10K on a contract. He had been working for the company for a couple of months and they had already paid him $15,000 more or less on time, so when a month finished and he was owed another 5K and it didn't come right away he didn't really sweat it. Things went down hill in the middle of the next month when the employer said that they were retroactively reducing his rate because they really thought that they weren't paying him hourly, but rather a full time salary (though his contract specified an hourly rate) and they expected him to be working at least 50 hours a week for that salary. He promptly quit, though the employer begged him to stay on for one more week as a "professional courtesy". Being the kind of guy that he is he stayed for the following week. The day after he quit the company (really just two people and a couple of other contract developers) got TechCrunched (they have been multiple times since) to announce a rather large round of funding they had received. I remember him joking that night that at least he was sure he would get paid now. Fast-forward a three months and a check has still not arrived despite his boss saying that it had been mailed several times. Then it changed to "I'm putting it in the mail on Monday." Eventually he sent a polite email saying how he was really hoping to get the check soon because he was planning on using that money to support his family new family (his wife was 9 months pregnant at the time). A check finally came but only for 9K instead of 10K. I think he was just incredibly happy to have finally gotten something after all those months. It turned out that other developers/designers were in the same boat as my friend and never got paid, or were only paid part of what they were owed. This all happened at the same time that the company was getting press and raising more money. I remember just being shocked whenever I would see this company written up in tech blogs while thinking "But, these are the same people who are totally screwing my friend and at least three other people they hired. How can they actually be getting positive press, they're total scumbags."