> "Josh Adler - the son of Kerry Adler, a wealthy Canadian businessman - presided over a culture of instability, resulting in high turnover of staff and errors due to "cutting corners" and hiring and firing inexperienced contractors"
> "he "bragged" about living at the Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Abu Dhabi, boasted about renting a villa in Bali, and showed off a newly purchased Porsche 911 and multiple speeding fines"
Ironically, many of his victims appear to be average people who have invested their personal savings (one actually remortgaging her house) in a website/app idea.
I never get why these types always end up running such naked scams - he’s clearly got a gift for sales, with a decent technical founder to back him up, they could be rolling in dough without failing to deliver the actual product
One issue is agencies can have vague contracts because customers did not have a good grasp of what they actually needed, start increasing scope in subtle ways. For example, you deliver a feature and during CAT they find a way to inject new requirements as if they were defects.
These agencies usually don’t have lawyers, so new contracts are full of exploitable holes. You say “we’ll build an e-commerce app with inventory management”, without specifying exactly what inventory management means, your client will start experimenting on your dime and can easily make it seem like it’s your fault. The larger the client, the worse this becomes.
You should always, always make your contracts as specific as possible, but this requires consulting work to nail down requirements before a contract is finalized, and that has a cost, but clients don’t value this and want you “the expert” to magically fill in the blanks in their ideas like an LLM, for free.
Another issue is your team. You might be very competent, but your team might not, hiring is hard. I once had to fire half of my team and build a 6 month client project in 1 month at great cost to my work / life balance because they were just unable to make meaningful progress. Granted, my leadership was not top notch there (being too busy to check on progress and trusting standups is a bad strategy) and I learned a lot, adjusted accordingly.
These are a few counter examples, but I still believe if this is a pattern then you’re a crook.
I mean surely there’s a difference between outright scams where you deliver nothing that works vs what a lot of consulting orgs do where you at least deliver something functional, even if not exactly what the customer wants. One of those is more likely to get you charges than the other.
> Customers who say they spent their life savings without receiving a viable product - they told the BBC they received products from ConvrtX which didn't work or match what they had paid for
An MVP would have sufficed, though they couldn’t be bothered to at least do that. Of course, they should have also said no to the downright unreasonable ideas that some of the customers had for their budget (e.g. accessing all of the phone data remotely, on a startup budget).
But it’s pretty obvious that they had no love for the craft nor even the most basic respect for their customers and just cared about the money.
cf bait and switch, pervasive moral hazard of poorly regulated markets, and I include major stock exchanges in that. Anyone can sell anyone an attractive lie (and this goes beyond economics to include e.g. voter preferences), but that is not a particular "talent", more the mark of a sociopath.
I know a couple of people who have sort of done that, including one person who made an app to view all books in all libraries of Delhi. He bought a nice sedan with his seed money and bragged about it. (probably worth a few lakhs easily, not like a high end one but better than what I had cause I had just graduated and was interning)
It's the kind of thing that existed since the 1990s in the UK, though moving with the technology of the time. The first version would have required using a computer in the library.
>> So don't tell the client that it cannot be done because we'll find [a contractor] that can do it when they've paid
As a software developer (who did contract work in the past). I think this is actually sound logic within certain parameters... Sometimes clients do ask for impossible or infeasible things. But in most cases, the constraints are money and skills. Someone who is good at sales should not have to reject clients because something is difficult. There are plenty of skilled software devs who are looking for opportunities. It's just unfortunate that talent discovery is broken and sales people cannot find technical people who are capable of delivering working products.
In theory there isn't anything wrong with promising something you don't have but which you know you can access through the markets. The real problem occurs when you think you can access something through the markets but, really, you can't because that particular market is dysfunctional.
IMO, the software developer market is highly dysfunctional. There are people straight out of university who know nothing and can't deliver anything on their own earning over $200k per year and seasoned experts who can deliver anything barely earning 100k.
> Someone who is good at sales should not have to reject clients because something is difficult.
What does that even mean, honestly? Because I would argue that a salesperson who doesn’t accurately represent the product or service they’re selling is a conman, and I think there is a fair bit of established law on the subject.
Ideally, skillsets should align. If a person sells well, but the company can't deliver on that sale, something clearly is amiss. It could be that the salesguy overpromised, executives saw what they wanted to see, or that the delivering team failed.
FWIW, reading the article on that app, it did not sound particular awe-inspiring ( though kinda useful ) so it does not sound like level of technical challenge was the issue here.
But what does “sell well” mean, because once again, making sales is significantly easier when you’re unburdened by the truth. Are you saying it’s not the salesman’s fault that his product is crap so he needs to lie to make sales?
> There are people straight out of university who know nothing and can't deliver anything on their own earning over $200k per year and seasoned experts who can deliver anything barely earning 100k.
In my model of the world, there is exactly one country in the world that values skilled labor, the US. The highly skilled 100k people from abroad are firewalled from it by the visa regime and the fact that most people with money have IQ too low to effectively work remotely (so they have to work in person to be able to assess the vibes of a person using their lizard brain).
The 200k kids are from good families (hence psychologically stable) joining established orgs where the important thing is to be a good cog shapeable into a decent engineer rather than just the ability to deliver.
> Eventually, she requested a refund through her bank and complained to the UK's Financial Ombudsman Service. A senior investigator there has provisionally recommended that the bank return $39,000 (£30,000) to Amy, according to documents seen by the BBC. She is still waiting for her bank to agree to the recommendation.
Glad that this is possible in the UK. There are a ton of folks in Dubai itself who have fallen to similar scams, but they have had no reprieve from their banks (most of which are actually all too happy to facilitate those scams).
I whole heartedly disagree. This guy is clearly a crook, I feel horrible for the woman but this is basic B2B contracts. Banks shouldn’t be the arbiter of B2B contract terms.
My understanding is that when you transfer large sums (such as 30K) to an overseas account for the first time, the British bank is required to block it and ask you questions.
The first time I transferred money to an overseas account in my name, the bank blocked the transfer for a day until I gave them proof that I was the owner of the account, what I was doing with the money and that I wasn’t being scammed.
Probably people who do not understand how the UK system works and think the banks are just recovering the money rather than taking a loss when the money canot be recovered.
It has made banks very nervous about transfers as even payments to a legitimate business can be part of a a fraud (e.g. buy gold and hand it over to the fraudster for "safe keeping") and people have complained they have had problems making legitimate transfers.
Oh, that really explains some stories I have heard about cars. That banks simply refuse some purchases from more independent sellers. Sometimes the fraud detection and avoidance can go too far.
I did not know about it as a problem with cars, but it makes sense that it is.
It is likely to come up a lot with private sales. Banks are unlikely to let the seller deposit cash (because of money laundering rules), so if they do not allow a payment by transfer its going to become impossible.
Exactly, which is why banks are loathe to approve such transfers in the first place. I'm wholly surprised that the banking ombudsman is able to force such transaction reversals.
I honestly don't know. That's why I'm surprised the UK actually has provisions for clawing back funds. Maybe they put adequate pressure on the Dubai-based banks to reverse the transfer?
Falling for a company that doesn't deliver the level of quality it promised seems to stretch the definition of "scam".
Is there any requirement of diligence, or can you basically jump on any "100% profit in 3 weeks" scam and get (most of) the money back when it doesn't work out?
No, but in this case I think it does meet the definition of scam.
There is a requirement for diligence, but this requires not being "grossly negligent". Even this is waived for people classed as vulnerable (I do not know exactly what that means).
Theme: normal people who know nothing about technology "have an idea for an app" with no clue what that actually entails.
It's a shame they got swindled, but the company had totally unrealistic proposals. I bet these people scoffed at quotes from legitimate shops. How so many people will invest their life savings without doing much research is astonishing.
These are the same people who will now pay for AI slop.
The best thing about tech is that technology becomes a commodity very quickly.
Now you don't need to pay huge sums of money to these consultant grifters any more as now AI tools like Cursor, Windsurf, Devin, Bolt, Lovable and Replit can build these apps and websites for you almost for free.
I nearly signed off a six figure deal for someone to make an app for us and we instead went down the AI tools route after some evaluation and prototyping and we saved a lot of money on this to get it built.
This was very sad to read and I wish these people found these tools at all or even sooner rather than plowing their money into scammers.
Don’t get it. Cheaper ways of doing software have been always available; that doesn’t mean they are the best way. You get what you pay for, as usual. Anybody thinking that 2025 AI is some sort of magical “free lunch” device, is just delusional.
Agreed, either you get bit by your choice early on and can’t ship, or you ship and get bit later when trying to maintain the puddle of guck you just shipped.
If you don’t know how to do it, you don’t know how to do it. Learn how to do it.
Yes, many things can do rapid prototyping, especially for CRUD apps. And yes, professional programmers can go very fast with the right tech. Unfortunately in most cases, programmers use what they know, because discovering the tool that already does 99% of what you’re customer needs is already a lot of work.
So people who are out of the loop clearly won’t know about Bolt or Claude.
Sorry, but these tools are far from usable for the average run-of-the-mill guy. They are specifically tailored for developers and people who can code. The people who were scammed were literally average folks, a working mum, a tarot-card reader, a truck driver....
If a scammer wants to, they can flee from all repercussions without building anything, even if all the AI tools were available to them. While Josh Adler is just one person, there are multiple such people in Dubai who've done the same to thousands of victims. Dubai is notorious for attracting those types.
I'll give her the benefit of the doubt here. I'm also going to presume she wanted something that could be done with Squarespace and Stripe. Years ago I heard of someone calling Dell sales looking to set up file and printer sharing at a small business. Dell offered them a PowerEdge server.
To be fair, I presume most of the folks getting their tarot cards read at some county fair are usually doing it for the cheap entertainment value rather than actual actionable advice. Pay $10 for a few laughs for some time.
I'm a coder and got ripped off when outsourcing coding (because I didn't know the tech stack). Luckily lost $2k before I cut my losses and run. They kept begging for more money while returning buggy shit. So yeah easy to get ripped off and easy to get played. If you hire agencies (or any contractors) you need to be default asshole with rod up their ass. Milestones. Deliverables. Quality. Or no pay.
> "Josh Adler - the son of Kerry Adler, a wealthy Canadian businessman - presided over a culture of instability, resulting in high turnover of staff and errors due to "cutting corners" and hiring and firing inexperienced contractors"
> "he "bragged" about living at the Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Abu Dhabi, boasted about renting a villa in Bali, and showed off a newly purchased Porsche 911 and multiple speeding fines"
Ironically, many of his victims appear to be average people who have invested their personal savings (one actually remortgaging her house) in a website/app idea.
I never get why these types always end up running such naked scams - he’s clearly got a gift for sales, with a decent technical founder to back him up, they could be rolling in dough without failing to deliver the actual product
One issue is agencies can have vague contracts because customers did not have a good grasp of what they actually needed, start increasing scope in subtle ways. For example, you deliver a feature and during CAT they find a way to inject new requirements as if they were defects.
These agencies usually don’t have lawyers, so new contracts are full of exploitable holes. You say “we’ll build an e-commerce app with inventory management”, without specifying exactly what inventory management means, your client will start experimenting on your dime and can easily make it seem like it’s your fault. The larger the client, the worse this becomes.
You should always, always make your contracts as specific as possible, but this requires consulting work to nail down requirements before a contract is finalized, and that has a cost, but clients don’t value this and want you “the expert” to magically fill in the blanks in their ideas like an LLM, for free.
Another issue is your team. You might be very competent, but your team might not, hiring is hard. I once had to fire half of my team and build a 6 month client project in 1 month at great cost to my work / life balance because they were just unable to make meaningful progress. Granted, my leadership was not top notch there (being too busy to check on progress and trusting standups is a bad strategy) and I learned a lot, adjusted accordingly.
These are a few counter examples, but I still believe if this is a pattern then you’re a crook.
I mean surely there’s a difference between outright scams where you deliver nothing that works vs what a lot of consulting orgs do where you at least deliver something functional, even if not exactly what the customer wants. One of those is more likely to get you charges than the other.
> Customers who say they spent their life savings without receiving a viable product - they told the BBC they received products from ConvrtX which didn't work or match what they had paid for
An MVP would have sufficed, though they couldn’t be bothered to at least do that. Of course, they should have also said no to the downright unreasonable ideas that some of the customers had for their budget (e.g. accessing all of the phone data remotely, on a startup budget).
But it’s pretty obvious that they had no love for the craft nor even the most basic respect for their customers and just cared about the money.
Hanlon's razor's aside, I can only think that these types aren't satisfied just being successful, they have a pathological need to scam people.
—François de La Rochefoucauld, 1665He might be good at sales and scamming, but is he good at maintaining authentic relationships with people long enough to deliver good product?
My guess is definitely not.
It's depressing that most startups fail whereas some rich kid can just scam people into giving him money to make his startup "successful".
Lack of morals made him money. You could do the old knock on old people's houses and tell them their roof needs fixing shit. Same thing really.
There is some talent to pull in customers for sure, but the dude has no interest in delivering and just lies about the possibilities.
cf bait and switch, pervasive moral hazard of poorly regulated markets, and I include major stock exchanges in that. Anyone can sell anyone an attractive lie (and this goes beyond economics to include e.g. voter preferences), but that is not a particular "talent", more the mark of a sociopath.
I know a couple of people who have sort of done that, including one person who made an app to view all books in all libraries of Delhi. He bought a nice sedan with his seed money and bragged about it. (probably worth a few lakhs easily, not like a high end one but better than what I had cause I had just graduated and was interning)
>app to view all books in all libraries of Delhi
Is this an example of a scam or a legit app? Sounds nice but not profitable.
It's the kind of thing that existed since the 1990s in the UK, though moving with the technology of the time. The first version would have required using a computer in the library.
Example for Birmingham: https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/info/50163/library_services/15...
I never used the app so cannot comment. The guy is legitimate. He works at a top tier company now is all I can say...
>> So don't tell the client that it cannot be done because we'll find [a contractor] that can do it when they've paid
As a software developer (who did contract work in the past). I think this is actually sound logic within certain parameters... Sometimes clients do ask for impossible or infeasible things. But in most cases, the constraints are money and skills. Someone who is good at sales should not have to reject clients because something is difficult. There are plenty of skilled software devs who are looking for opportunities. It's just unfortunate that talent discovery is broken and sales people cannot find technical people who are capable of delivering working products.
In theory there isn't anything wrong with promising something you don't have but which you know you can access through the markets. The real problem occurs when you think you can access something through the markets but, really, you can't because that particular market is dysfunctional.
IMO, the software developer market is highly dysfunctional. There are people straight out of university who know nothing and can't deliver anything on their own earning over $200k per year and seasoned experts who can deliver anything barely earning 100k.
> Someone who is good at sales should not have to reject clients because something is difficult.
What does that even mean, honestly? Because I would argue that a salesperson who doesn’t accurately represent the product or service they’re selling is a conman, and I think there is a fair bit of established law on the subject.
Ideally, skillsets should align. If a person sells well, but the company can't deliver on that sale, something clearly is amiss. It could be that the salesguy overpromised, executives saw what they wanted to see, or that the delivering team failed.
FWIW, reading the article on that app, it did not sound particular awe-inspiring ( though kinda useful ) so it does not sound like level of technical challenge was the issue here.
But what does “sell well” mean, because once again, making sales is significantly easier when you’re unburdened by the truth. Are you saying it’s not the salesman’s fault that his product is crap so he needs to lie to make sales?
"It's not impossible, you are just obstinate. Get it done or we find someone with more skills"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
'Surely it is not a difficult task' got me.
> There are people straight out of university who know nothing and can't deliver anything on their own earning over $200k per year and seasoned experts who can deliver anything barely earning 100k.
In my model of the world, there is exactly one country in the world that values skilled labor, the US. The highly skilled 100k people from abroad are firewalled from it by the visa regime and the fact that most people with money have IQ too low to effectively work remotely (so they have to work in person to be able to assess the vibes of a person using their lizard brain).
The 200k kids are from good families (hence psychologically stable) joining established orgs where the important thing is to be a good cog shapeable into a decent engineer rather than just the ability to deliver.
If what you said is true then what you said is false, because you made the case that the US obviously does not value skilled labour.
> Eventually, she requested a refund through her bank and complained to the UK's Financial Ombudsman Service. A senior investigator there has provisionally recommended that the bank return $39,000 (£30,000) to Amy, according to documents seen by the BBC. She is still waiting for her bank to agree to the recommendation.
Glad that this is possible in the UK. There are a ton of folks in Dubai itself who have fallen to similar scams, but they have had no reprieve from their banks (most of which are actually all too happy to facilitate those scams).
I whole heartedly disagree. This guy is clearly a crook, I feel horrible for the woman but this is basic B2B contracts. Banks shouldn’t be the arbiter of B2B contract terms.
I am very curious about who’s downvoting this; do people really think it’s the bank’s responsibility?
My understanding is that when you transfer large sums (such as 30K) to an overseas account for the first time, the British bank is required to block it and ask you questions.
The first time I transferred money to an overseas account in my name, the bank blocked the transfer for a day until I gave them proof that I was the owner of the account, what I was doing with the money and that I wasn’t being scammed.
That's for account hacking and similar. In this case, the customers were buying "tech services" and at least not expecting to be scammed.
These are for personal bank accounts. Business banking is different.
Small business accounts are covered by the same rules.
Probably people who do not understand how the UK system works and think the banks are just recovering the money rather than taking a loss when the money canot be recovered.
And guess who is paying for her mistake? Everyone except the perpetrator. That bank refund comes from somewhere.
In my country this is only possible if enough funds are in the target account (banks coorporate), it's not a general customer refund...
In the UK if the funds cannot be recovered the bank takes the loss for push fraud.
https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/what-to-do-if...
It has made banks very nervous about transfers as even payments to a legitimate business can be part of a a fraud (e.g. buy gold and hand it over to the fraudster for "safe keeping") and people have complained they have had problems making legitimate transfers.
Oh, that really explains some stories I have heard about cars. That banks simply refuse some purchases from more independent sellers. Sometimes the fraud detection and avoidance can go too far.
I did not know about it as a problem with cars, but it makes sense that it is.
It is likely to come up a lot with private sales. Banks are unlikely to let the seller deposit cash (because of money laundering rules), so if they do not allow a payment by transfer its going to become impossible.
It seems unfair to other customers of the bank to require the bank to "return" 75% of the money.
This should be a matter for business insurance.
Small businesses will often not have business insurance, and private individuals will not.
I doubt insurance covers this sort of thing though.
ti is quite annoying getting "is this a fraud?" warnings on every transfer - even small amounts to my kids!
Exactly, which is why banks are loathe to approve such transfers in the first place. I'm wholly surprised that the banking ombudsman is able to force such transaction reversals.
> wholly surprised that the banking ombudsman is able to force such transaction reversal
They can't force transaction reversals or clawbanks. They actually force the bank to take the hit.
Except that she still hasn't received the money back yet
How does that work? Her bank is responsible for the delivery of services she agrees on with third parties in other countries?
I honestly don't know. That's why I'm surprised the UK actually has provisions for clawing back funds. Maybe they put adequate pressure on the Dubai-based banks to reverse the transfer?
No, the bank just takes a loss if necessary. See my comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43810904
But it does not apply to international transfers: Apparently international payments are no covered: https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/businesses/complaints...
Of course the victims might have transferred to an account the scammer has in the UK
Falling for a company that doesn't deliver the level of quality it promised seems to stretch the definition of "scam".
Is there any requirement of diligence, or can you basically jump on any "100% profit in 3 weeks" scam and get (most of) the money back when it doesn't work out?
No, but in this case I think it does meet the definition of scam.
There is a requirement for diligence, but this requires not being "grossly negligent". Even this is waived for people classed as vulnerable (I do not know exactly what that means).
Theme: normal people who know nothing about technology "have an idea for an app" with no clue what that actually entails.
It's a shame they got swindled, but the company had totally unrealistic proposals. I bet these people scoffed at quotes from legitimate shops. How so many people will invest their life savings without doing much research is astonishing.
These are the same people who will now pay for AI slop.
The best thing about tech is that technology becomes a commodity very quickly.
Now you don't need to pay huge sums of money to these consultant grifters any more as now AI tools like Cursor, Windsurf, Devin, Bolt, Lovable and Replit can build these apps and websites for you almost for free.
I nearly signed off a six figure deal for someone to make an app for us and we instead went down the AI tools route after some evaluation and prototyping and we saved a lot of money on this to get it built.
This was very sad to read and I wish these people found these tools at all or even sooner rather than plowing their money into scammers.
What did you build?
I have not seen an example of anything that should cost six figures done by traditional development done using AI tools.
Don’t get it. Cheaper ways of doing software have been always available; that doesn’t mean they are the best way. You get what you pay for, as usual. Anybody thinking that 2025 AI is some sort of magical “free lunch” device, is just delusional.
Agreed, either you get bit by your choice early on and can’t ship, or you ship and get bit later when trying to maintain the puddle of guck you just shipped.
If you don’t know how to do it, you don’t know how to do it. Learn how to do it.
That paying more insures quality software delivered by humans is delusional as well.
Half the early startup code I’ve seen delivered by agencies can best be described as performance art.
At least with AI delivered code the most likely output is some middle of the road boilerplate.
Oh you sweet summer child. Bless your little heart.
What do you think that AI was trained on?
The median. Which is 1000x better than what lots of these agencies are peddling.
But tech has always been un-navigable.
Yes, many things can do rapid prototyping, especially for CRUD apps. And yes, professional programmers can go very fast with the right tech. Unfortunately in most cases, programmers use what they know, because discovering the tool that already does 99% of what you’re customer needs is already a lot of work.
So people who are out of the loop clearly won’t know about Bolt or Claude.
AI vibe coders are just another stream of frauds.
Sorry, but these tools are far from usable for the average run-of-the-mill guy. They are specifically tailored for developers and people who can code. The people who were scammed were literally average folks, a working mum, a tarot-card reader, a truck driver....
If a scammer wants to, they can flee from all repercussions without building anything, even if all the AI tools were available to them. While Josh Adler is just one person, there are multiple such people in Dubai who've done the same to thousands of victims. Dubai is notorious for attracting those types.
This wouldn’t be the first time “tarot card reader” and “scammed” have appeared in the same sentence.
I'll give her the benefit of the doubt here. I'm also going to presume she wanted something that could be done with Squarespace and Stripe. Years ago I heard of someone calling Dell sales looking to set up file and printer sharing at a small business. Dell offered them a PowerEdge server.
Not sure why she would go to national media. Seems clear that she can't be too good at her job.
To be fair, I presume most of the folks getting their tarot cards read at some county fair are usually doing it for the cheap entertainment value rather than actual actionable advice. Pay $10 for a few laughs for some time.
I'm a coder and got ripped off when outsourcing coding (because I didn't know the tech stack). Luckily lost $2k before I cut my losses and run. They kept begging for more money while returning buggy shit. So yeah easy to get ripped off and easy to get played. If you hire agencies (or any contractors) you need to be default asshole with rod up their ass. Milestones. Deliverables. Quality. Or no pay.