How A Con Man Scammed A Silicon Valley Company
from the selling-ice-to-eskimos dept
The San Jose Mercury News has the story of a sales guy hired by Silicon Valley firm Sagent to focus on the government market. Turns out the “sales guy” had quite a record as a con man, and proceeded to live up to that reputation by completely making up most of his sales. The company never seemed to investigate any of the sales at all. The sales guy simply wrote up purchase orders, using fake names and information – and requested the software be sent directly to him to deliver, even though most other customers required help implementing the software. The company, which was public, needed sales badly and so used these non-existent sales to prop up their income statement. Of course, when the scam was revealed, the stock tanked. The amazing thing is that no one ever thought to check up on this guy (who was actually pulling the same scam on at least two companies at the time).
