I could really care less about the $2700 that I am owed at this point, I was seriously hoping some criminal action would be taken in this situation. I mean, he was on this very message board personally guaranteeing everyone that they had the funds to pay out the winners even though he already knew they were in financial trouble but he just wanted to con people into continuing to deposit money which is no different than robbing them IMO. He should have been required to stop taking deposits the MINUTE he ran out of funds to pay the winners. If that is friggin legal, what's to stop anyone from just starting a bunch of internet contests and GUARANTEEING $100K prizes or whatever, take a bunch of credit card deposits, give themselves a huge salary and then tell everyone to #### off and declare bankruptcy for the so called company and just get away with it with no penalty? Thats some serious b.s. How could that not be a crime? Especially considering he used the internet, took cc payments, interstate commerce laws, all that crap? Shouldn't there be some laws that if you are going to run a contest like this with guaranteed prize pools that you have to have the payouts secured in some sort of trust account and not co-mingle it with operating funds to protect the consumers? Nothing he did was was illegal? There's no law enforcement agency that can do ANYTHING about it? I find the whole thing unbelievable.
I don't want my money, I want this lying sack of monkey turd scammer thrown in prison. That's the only thing that is going to make me happy at this point.
My take is there probably won't be any criminal action taken. As expected there are a lot of legal threats and ramblings in this thread and the AFFL thread, but that's not usually the way it works in the real world. Unfortunately, nobody in law enforcement really cares that you lost money in a failed website. It just gets thrown in the same category as the mass of humanity that has lost money on ebay or paypal. From my own experience, law enforcement either doesn't give a **** or doesn't have the resources to deal with it. You can't just call the local police, the BBB, the Justice Department, the FBI, the SEC, the CIA, MI6, Sector 7, or throw up the bat signal to get the money back. I wish it was that easy but it's not. Law enforcement is so overwhelmed with ID theft and internet fraud cases already. So unless it's for significant amounts (minimum $100K personal loss to get the Feds even midly interested) or there is a huge target involved (Elliot Spitzer, etc), you just get the runaround. Maybe you get lucky and find somebody who gives a **** but that hasn't been my experience in the past. Criminal charges cost even more money to achieve and a failed business model does not automatically equal fraud. In the end, this type of stuff usually goes unprosecuted.
