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Comment by kreetx | Hacker News Reader

Quite a few negative comments in this thread. Shouldn't the attitude be: very good job on the transparency front!! Everything else doesn't matter -- or rather, it does (filling all tge orders, etc.), but the high morals I find most interesting in this case.

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I wish they had called the police. Apparently they chose not to because the penalties are severe? That's ridiculous, she deserves a hefty jail sentence.

I wouldn't be surprised if the "owner" was on it together with the account manager or that other dodgy things are going on that would have been discovered by LE.

> The factory agreed in writing that we own all the tooling we've paid for and that they will make it available for us to move to another factory if we want to.

This, in concert with the fact that the factory has agreed to give it a second shot, makes that scenario unlikely. For a factory owner in the business of scamming people, it would be far easier just to back out than suddenly start operating like a legitimate business once your scapegoat got busted.

But is he really an owner?

at the end of the original post is this statement:

Before commenting on this update

As we wrote at the start of this update, it contains some sensitive information and we're a little hesitant about posting it. In order to be able to post this publicly, we've got to set a few ground rules.

It's perfectly ok to post comments telling us that we were naive and too trusting. We're well aware.

Please do NOT post any comments or speculation about the identity of our account manager or factory or their motivations. Doing so may limit our ability to share details with you in the future. And we really want to be able to share details with you in the future.

"please do not speculate about motivations"

this is important. it makes the factory look bad, and in china that is an insult. doing that is not helpful for their relationship.

They chose not to because they felt the chance of getting a positive resolution was lower if they proceeded with criminal charges instead of civil.

Right, but if the choice came down to: Call the police and have her punished, or actually get the products shipped, factory still working with them and potentially some of the money not lost?

Presumably they decided what was in their backers interests vs fighting inside a foreign system that they'd likely have no say in.

I can understand a foreigner not relying on the Chinese police; you never know if you might be dealing with organised crime, in which case this will just make your life worse. Especially if the factory decided not to get the police involved.

(Also I suspect the upper limit sentence for this kind of crime may be the death penalty ... probably not for $100k of private money, but you never know)

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