'Tech entrepreneur took our money but failed to deliver our startup dreams'

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.

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.

    In the misfortune of our best friends, we often find something that is not displeasing.

He 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.

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.

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.

>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.

> 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.

"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

> 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.

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.

And guess who is paying for her mistake? Everyone except the perpetrator. That bank refund comes from somewhere.

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?

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.

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.