Asklemmy

I don't know if this qualifies as revenge, or just justice, but it's a good story, so I'll tell it.

For background - I live in the Phoenix area, so in the summer, air conditioning is not a luxury, it's a necessity.

Shady a/c tech put far too much freon in my system, charged me $500 for it, then every time the compressor turned on, it shook the house... The goal, I believe, was to ruin my old unit (a compressor will fail catastrophically if it pulls in liquid rather than gas) so they could sell me a new one for ~$8k. Overnight I went from knowing next to nothing about air conditioning to knowing enough to not take their shit... Gave the company the chance to make it right, but they doubled down, continued to say it was just because my system was old.

So I called another company - they found it was in fact massively overcharged, I had to pay ~$200 to have the excess freon removed (which, coincidentally was about what it should have cost to fix it properly in the first place).

Then I talked to my credit union to see if I could do a chargeback- I had used my debit card to pay the shady company. At first they were reluctant to take it on, since it wasn't the typical fraud case, they said it would be very difficult to prove- but because I had done the research and had everything laid out for them, they started the process. There was some back and forth, my offense was all technical with sources cited, the company's defense amounted to "we have x satisfied customers and have been in business for y years"... at one point the owner of the company called me, talked shit about me spending "a few minutes on the internet" and thinking I was an expert, and threatened to take me to court- I said "go ahead, then this will all be public record." He didn't sue me. I won the chargeback and never heard from the company or the owner again.

Edgar Allen Poe laid out the rules for a fully satisfying revenge in his story The Cask of Amontillado:

1. The revenge has to be worse than the original offense.

2. You have to get away with it.

3. The person has to know who did it, and why, yet there's nothing they can do about it.

Take away any of those factors, and it isn't a fully satisfying revenge plot.

A former computer repair employer of mine apparently had us running what they call a 'check racing scam' back around 2014. I didn't fully understand the nature of the scam back then, but I knew it seemed really fishy.

He'd write on the memo line 'loan to shareholder', though he wasn't on the stock market and we most definitely weren't shareholders.

When 2015 came, I was expecting my tax documents so I could file and get my tax returns in a timely manner, which should be given to employees in January and are due with the IRS by April 15th, at least here in the USA.

But no, even by April 15th, we still didn't have our tax documents. It was on that very day I quit, and I reported everything to his banker, his tax people, and Walmart, where he had us cashing those checks.

Needless to say, those organizations were not happy with my former employer. That's also how I learned what they call that sort of scam, a check racing scam.

He'd print out and have us cash checks in the amount of $1500 at Walmart, then have us bring the cash back to him and he'd go to his bank and deposit the money into his own account. Apparently Walmart doesn't bother verifying the checks for another 2 days or so if the amount doesn't exceed $1500.

As I reported his fraud to the different companies involved, I made it clear with them that any check in the amount of $1500 was part of his scam, but the lesser checks around ~$400 to $550 or so were my legit paychecks.

His tax people told me that what I reported answered a lot of questions they had. His banker said he didn't have the privilege to share the employer's banking data with me, to which I responded that I wasn't asking any questions, I was only there to report (with evidence in hand).

I forget what Walmart told me, but their money center apparently passed the info up the chain of command. And then I just walked, and took my own personal toolkit with me.

I was one of the best employees he ever had, nobody else was worth a shit at soldering or had the knowledge and ability to get rid of rootkit infections.

He had 5 shops open when I quit. Within 2 years, they shut all of them down. Last I heard through the grapevine was that he was planning on opening a restaurant somewhere.

Lesson: If you're running a tech shop, don't fuck with the hardware and data recovery specialist, we do keep backups.

As a final note, once I got my 'tax papers', it was in October, and it was just a fucking PostIt note with how much I earned the previous year.

Edit: Yes, I'd still do that again to this day, if I had to. I despise scammers, and I especially despise scamming employers that make their employees part of the scam as part of their terms of employment.

On Team Fortress 2 ?

Yes.

And it was glorious