It’s the story of a domain deal gone bad and now it looks like things are only getting worse for everyone associated with Bitcoin.com.
Last December, Roger Ver, a Bitcoin entrepreneur struck a five-year deal with OKCoin to redesign the website and pay Ver a percentage of the monthly revenue. Sounds simple right? Unfortunately it has been anything but that. According to Ver, OkCoin created fake legal documents giving themselves a six-month out clause, according to OkCoin the original contract was null and void to begin with. Here’s an excerpt from OkCoin’s latest press release:
During the internal review of this matter, it was found that the original contract entered into by a former OKCoin employee and Mr. Ver was itself not an official contract of the company. The contract was signed between Mr. Ver and “OKCoin”, failing to detail the legal entity with which Mr. Ver entered into a contractual agreement with. More alarmingly, it came to the company’s attention that the version of the contract Mr. Ver held and the one kept on file internally at OKCoin differed in its content. OKCoin is currently investigating the actions of the former employee for misconduct and other possibilities for the discrepancy. (Source – OkCoin Blog)
According to Ver, OkCoin used his signature from one version of the agreement to sign another fraudulent version:
“I can conclude that Document #4 [OKCoin’s version] was produced by someone who copied Document #1 [Ver’s version] after Roger signed it.” (Source – CoinDesk.com)
The battle has spilled onto Reddit and it’s getting uglier by the day. There’s a very important lesson here – be very careful about who you do business with, remember, businesses don’t do business with businesses, people do business with people, make sure you trust the people you are entering into an agreement with. I don’t know enough about the details of this issue to take a strong stance but it does sound like something funky happened with a second version of those documents so I’m leaning on the Ver side until I learn more.
What do you think? Comment and let your voice be heard!
Photo Credit: antanacoins via Compfight cc
