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A former employee of a startup is accusing it of scamming her out of thousands of dollars, and firing her after she filed an official complaint to retain the money.
Penny Kim used the online publishing platform Medium earlier this week to tell her story about WrkRiot, and describe how the Silicon Valley startup continuously used shady tactics to circumvent the proper and legal practices of a business.
Since then, several other employees and advisers have voluntarily told their negative experiences with the startup, according to TechCrunch. WrkRiot’s website and social media accounts have effectively vanished not too long after Kim’s post went live.
Kim omitted the name of the potentially illegitimate company and the people involved, and simply referred to the company as “Startup X.” Internet sleuths eventually identified the company as “WrkRiot,” whose founder is known to be Isaac Choi.
“Telling my story isn’t going to be easy,” Kim wrote. “Oftentimes I feel embarrassed, enraged, and regretful when I have to relive it, but in the end it is a story and life lesson which should be shared so that others may know major red flags to look out for when choosing to work for a startup or new business.”
According to Kim, she was hired for a marketing position at WrkRiot under an agreement with certain stipulations. She was to be granted $10,000 as part of signing bonus, since she was relocating from Texas to California. Kim was also to be given a yearly salary of $135,000, a portion of equity and a three-month severance package if she, “were to leave for a good reason and without cause.”
But she was never paid the proper amount. Choi consistently gave excuses for the payroll lapses. Kim demonstrates how Choi committed fraud by forging money transfers with Photoshop.
Eventually, after many frustrating attempts to retrieve her pay, Kim allegedly filed a wage claim with the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement, and tried to urge her fellow employees to do the same.
Kim was later fired for filing the claim.
While still operating under a public Facebook account — which is now private — WrkRiot claimed in a post that it, “is considering legal action against a disgruntled former employee who has launched a slanderous campaign,” according to TechCrunch. “WrkRiot believes this former employee’s writings have led to dangerous situations for many of our employees through the leaking of personal information and through threats being made over social media from others who have taken the former employee’s misinformation as truth,” the post read.
Daniel Tunkelang, a data scientist who was an adviser for WrkRiot, corroborated Kim’s testimony, and announced his regret over ever working with WrkRiot and Choi.
“Effective immediately, I have terminated any association with the company, and I have asked them to remove me from their team page and anywhere else they may have referred to me,” Tunkelang declared. “I never received any cash compensation from them, nor do I plan to exercise the options they issued to me. In other words, I have no financial connection to the company.”
But according to Kim, she is out a lot of money and wants answers. She blames the “default human condition to trust others and give the benefit of the doubt.”
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