Always pay your employees…

First of all, it’s the right thing to do.

Secondly, something like this might happen to you!

So all you business owners out there need to pay attention to this story.

Check out what happened!

Be sure to pay your IT help.

“I had been working at a computer repair shop on a commission-based system.

We would get PC’s in and the techs would not get paid until the repair work was paid for and if the client did not pay for the work performed the shop would take possession after a time and resell the equipment.

It was not uncommon for the techs to be screwed out of work they had done.

It gets worse…

To make this job sound even more appealing the shop owner would throw PCs from his friends and family to fix which was not paid work.

I was looking forward to a pretty big check due to just cranking out the repairs but I found out that these were all friends of the owners so I worked for free those 2 weeks.

They were about to get a surprise.

One of the things that we do is pull the HD’s and create a complete image of the whole drive for archival protection to be wiped after the job is done. Turns out that the owner of the computer shop and his wife were part of an “adult” community and were hosting a small but local site that they ran off of the notebook they brought in for repairs.

I grabbed the hard drive and told the owner that he needed to pay me for the work I had done.

The owner fired me on the spot.

I had grabbed my tools and I walked out the door without realizing I had the HD in my hand.

This guy was a scammer.

The owner had built a reputation in the small town it was located in for being a good Christian business, and the owner portrayed himself as a pillar of the community.

I happen to get the information off the drive and I was able to get access to his passwords, plus close to 4TB of pics, and videos of their website.

Waiting on my 3 weeks for the last check I decided that I would go scorched earth instead of looking for a payout.

This guy was really in for it.

Step 1, his business.

I had some time to look over the labor laws and found out he violated quite a few of them with me. We were treated as contractors but he took out taxes and SSI which he never paid into the system.

The other thing was we were required to clock in like hourly employees but were paid on commission so due to the pay structure, many employees were getting well under minimum wage for some weeks.

Step 2, his reputation.

Having the sign-on information I decided to do a few interesting things with the company website and their website.

I put a link at the bottom of the company webpage where I directed people to the site they ran and I change the password authentication to allow everyone into the paid areas of the site.

I also took down some of the pixelated pictures of him and his current wife and posted the original pics.

It took them about a week to find out about all of this. I also sent out a mass email to everyone on the owners’ email list to check out the site. I also gave his ex-wife the drive to help her in her court battle.

You can imagine what came next…

The fallout.

Long-standing contracts had terminated by his clients in droves. The labor board did an investigation and fined him for his rule-breaking and the IRS did an audit where they found further evidence of his crimes.

In the end, he lost his business, his kids, his reputation, and his current wife because he thought he was too much of a big shot to not pay his IT help.”

Now it’s time to see how people responded on Reddit.

This Reddit user said they could get in trouble because of this.

Another Reddit user would’ve handled it differently.

And this person thinks it sounds like a movie…

Don’t rip people off!

It’ll come back to bite you in the rear end!

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.