'Tech entrepreneur took our money but failed to deliver our startup dreams'

I never get why these types always end up running such naked scams - he’s clearly got a gift for sales, with a decent technical founder to back him up, they could be rolling in dough without failing to deliver the actual product

> "Josh Adler - the son of Kerry Adler, a wealthy Canadian businessman - presided over a culture of instability, resulting in high turnover of staff and errors due to "cutting corners" and hiring and firing inexperienced contractors"

> "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.

It's depressing that most startups fail whereas some rich kid can just scam people into giving him money to make his startup "successful".

There is some talent to pull in customers for sure, but the dude has no interest in delivering and just lies about the possibilities.

>> So don't tell the client that it cannot be done because we'll find [a contractor] that can do it when they've paid

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.

> Eventually, she requested a refund through her bank and complained to the UK's Financial Ombudsman Service. A senior investigator there has provisionally recommended that the bank return $39,000 (£30,000) to Amy, according to documents seen by the BBC. She is still waiting for her bank to agree to the recommendation.

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).

The best thing about tech is that technology becomes a commodity very quickly.

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.