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The article implies that the scam never made any money which is perhaps just as shocking as the con itself. I ran a real web agency and clients almost never as

• desireco42 5y ago
  It is really weird that they didn't start making a ton of money from all the energy and work people did. This guy must be some kind of sociopath to do this to people, it was easy to make this work even if it started as a scam.
• itronitron 5y ago
  Very weird to hire people to do work, and especially convincing them to leave their current job, when you don't have any work that needs to be done. Having said that, a variant of this type of behavior is not uncommon in large organizations where 'go-getters' can self-manifest by creating chatter and finding underlings. But in that case there is already a revenue flow to support time and attention.
  • hammock 5y ago
    >Very weird to hire people to do work, and especially convincing them to leave their current job, when you don't have any work that needs to be done. Spec work and pitch work are very much a thing. As counterintuitive or infuriating as it may seem, having no paying clients doesn't mean there is no work to be done, in the agency world.
• smcl 5y ago
  I read this story when I woke up earlier today so I was a little bleary-eyed and may have missed something, but I don't know how accurate that is. We know people didn't get paid but idk if we can be certain the company didn't get any money whatsoever.
  • awb 5y ago
    I based the assumption off of this anecdote: > But no deals were ever finalised. By February 2021, not a single client contract had been signed.
    • smorgusofborg 5y ago
      Yeah, but there's no reason to think some weren't stacking up on his desk and managing an agency successfully working average contracts wasn't what he was after.
      • awb 5y ago
        Right, but the point remains that the company made no money. It’s a lot of effort to do what he did and to not sign 1 contract especially as employee’s 6mo paychecks were coming up is still surprising to me.
        • smcl 5y ago
          So I read this too but it sounded like it was based on accounts from employees BBC could get hold of. I guess it's possible it's true but I find it hard to believe such a business could exist for a couple of months with absolutely no sales whatsoever.
        • smorgusofborg 5y ago
          I kind of suspect he was doing it all to build his personal profile as a potential CEO or management "influencer". If it wound down quietly with no contracts as an explanation for no hires, perhaps he would have already been on to a hefty salary somewhere chaotic but real leaving his fake partner winding things down.
• alx__ 5y ago
  Yeah I'm having a hard time believing it wasn't about money. Maybe he was already decently wealthy and just wanted to role play as a successful creative director? For the folks who got tricked I feel bad for them. That's a rough way to learn the lesson to be very suspicious of commission based work. It's usually a losing situation
  • deleted 5y ago
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• lordnacho 5y ago
  The article says they hired sales people as well. Maybe that was the plan? Use "credit" to get the product and the buyers, ball gets rolling, zero to one done. But it seems a bit nuts too. It actually takes effort to run a business with a bunch of people, and more if you have to remember all the lies you told each person. Perhaps what it really says is that success appears so superficial these days, a random chancer thought he was close enough to having all the pieces that he gave it a shot. It's only a few steps away from "this equity will be worth a million in 4 years".