The scam that was Furniture.com

from the can-it-get-any-more-humiliating dept

Mon, Jul 31st 2000 6:14am — Dan Miller

This is a fascinating story about how Furniture.com executives put on quite the show in order to stave off bankruptcy a couple months back. Ultimately, the company failed to pull it off, but the lengths these people went to are impressive, if not short-sighted.

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Mike (profile), 31 Jul 2000 @ 2:10pm

Definitely fascinating
I agree that this is a fascinating story and well worth reading. The interesting part, though, is that this is not all that different than what happens at a number of dot com startups (at least it seems fairly common in the Bay Area). I think a lot of the problem is that we're not dealing with people who want to build businesses, but rather people who want to get rich damn quickly.
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- Ed, 31 Jul 2000 @ 8:20pm
  
  Re: Definitely fascinating
  Agreed. Quite fascinating.
  
  Regarding the allegation that employees were forced to fake phone activity to make the potential investors think there was more business, isn't this plain, out-and-out fraud? How's that any different than what Newman and Redford did in "The Sting?" I'd like to think that I have enough integrity to refuse to participate in such a scam. Fortunately none of my employers has ever been so desperate or so dishonest.
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