Oh no, Silicon Valley! Failed startup CEO on fraud rap after allegedly bullsh*ting staff and refusing to pay them In an indictment unsealed on Wednesday, Isaac Choi, founder and CEO of failed Silicon Valley job search startup WrkRiot, was charged with five counts of wire fraud for allegedly defrauding former employees. Problems at the upstart surfaced in August when Penny Kim, former head of marketing for the company, published an account …
How long does US banks take for a wire transfer? In the UK, it's literally minutes nowadays (from high street bank to high street bank). If someone showed me a confirmation slip, I'd expect the funds to be in my bank by the time I log in. Not there and I'd be kicking off immediately, not working for another month or however long these guys took to realise they'd been conned.
It can take longer occasionally. It's a much larger place and very often smaller banks and credit unions have an agreement with a larger organisation to act as a world-facing portal for them (potentially reduces the amount of infrastructure and staff you need), so there's an extra step. This may have changed in recent years, one place I use now manages same-day stuff when it used to take a couple so perhaps they've cut out the middleman.
Had I been an employee, I think at some point I would have looked around at what company assets I could remove, to be redeemed when the money arrived in my bank. However, if it was a building with a few desks and PCs then that probably wasn't a viable option.
I dealt with a similar, but (marginally) less sleazy outfit back in the 1980s.
Paycheques were deposited... sort of. That is to say, money was transferred from the company to the bank, but the amount would only cover a subset of number of employees. So if you acted early, you got your money out and into a different bank and were okay; if you took too long (ie. waited until the end of day), the money transferred would be exhausted, and you'd have nothing to show for it.
It was all very clever, with the only problem being that the scam only lasted until the employee decided to withdraw funds, at which point the jig was up.
Which is to say, it lasted one day. It's long like this was an ongoing situation.
I can see a single pay period scam, but the idea that a company can be maintained for a long period without actually paying people is a lot more difficult to pull off than people think.
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