Nobody has argued that scamming is not illegal.  Right now, though, there is no known criminal investigation into pirate's operation.  He can't be prosecuted, convicted and punished for fraud without substantial evidence.  Many users are actively against the idea of trying to initiate a criminal investigation because they believe that it will reduce the chances of recovering their funds even further.  Others are unwilling to send good money after bad by pursuing civil action while it's unclear whether pirate has any ability whatsoever to pay any judgements.

Whether pirate's actions are contractual breaches or criminal offences does not affect whether harassing him or his family is in itself an offence.

What on earth makes you think that his parents assets have anything to do with this or that they'd bail him out?

And the wrong kind of pressure could backfire.  I can tell you right now that no matter what they had done, if someone ever threatened my children or my grandchildren my family would close ranks.


Until there's an active criminal investigation, this is a civil matter.  The family is perfectly entitled to take action to legal action in respect of harassment.  Just because you're harassing someone over something illegal doesn't mean that harassment itself is suddenly legal.  Especially in a community where you're well established, the police are for more likely to be concerned with protecting your rights than those of some strangers who live in another jurisdiction.

I know that you don't have the money right now, but either that property is the deal of a lifetime at $3,000 per month so you need to do everything possible to raise the money before someone else snaps it up or there's one or more problems with the property which make it unattractive to other potential tenants and you need to start looking at other properties.  It wouldn't be a bad idea to look at what other properties of a similar size and in similar locations are renting for, especially those which already have commercial food preparation areas and sufficient toilets installed.  The rent will be more expensive, but you don't have the tens of thousands of dollars which those kinds of build-outs require in your start-up budget.

And I still want to know what type of tomatoes you're growing!

Also, have you thought about funding your venture with credit cards?  From everything I've read on places like FatWallet, they seem obscenely easy to obtain in the US and they have the advantage of making funds available to you immediately.  Right now, you're not attracting funding fast enough for this venture to get off the ground this year so you need to start exploring other funding methods.

Phin, there's are already a number of hookah franchise companies in the US.

Here's what one of them lists as the start-up costs for a hookah lounge. 

http://www.luxchateau.com/investment-and-fees.php

Obviously dank's start-up costs wouldn't include a franchise fee and he wouldn't be paying royalties.

Also, legal action is slow.  Even if there's a community fund for it, people aren't going to get their money back in the short term.  People need to start approaching their Bitcoin dealings with the understanding that if something goes wrong it's not going to be weeks or months before they can recover their funds - it will be much longer.  People need to stop risking money which they can't afford to lose.

If a community legal fund is established, how are you going to determine who gets to use those funds for legal action?  Some claims - perhaps the majority - will not be cost effective to pursue outside of small claims and a judgement is worthless unless someone has the means to pay.

That's not really true.  logansryche wanted people to donate $350,000 so that he could re-open an old theatre in a town of 9,000 people.  He hadn't even looked at the building, he planned on showing movies on a home theatre system, the building hadn't been inspected for years, there were modern theatres in nearby towns and his best estimate was that the theatre would make $35,000 per year.  The vision he had was not even remotely viable, whereas dank's could be if it's properly done.


What type of tomatoes are you growing?  I just planted Florida Baskets and Romas.  I'm hoping they survive our expected El Nino summer.

If I'd waited a week for an agent to ring me back regarding a commercial property, I'd be pissed off enough to find out who owned the property and contact them directly and make sure I let them know that their property was sitting vacant despite people wanting to lease it.  Mind you, I would probably have gone to the agent's office to get all the information I required regarding the property after the first time they didn't return my call.

You can't sit around and hope people will get back to you in business.  Imagine if you were almost out of stock for your core business and your supplier wasn't returning your calls.

dank, I linked you to this sample business plan for a hookah bar before.

http://www.bplans.com/hookah_bar_business_plan/executive_summary_fc.php#.UFmnNrIgeul

Have you at least started work on producing a similar type of document.  You'll need to put in numbers which you can back up with facts rather than guesses and you'll need to put in information which is specific to your area, but you can use it as a template if you've never written a business plan before.  

A quick and dirty way you can do research for your business plan is by using SurveyMonkey.  Get a link to your survey put in the local college newspapers and on their website.  Do the same with the Middle Eastern community newspapers and websites for your area and you'll get fairly accurate information about your potential customer base which you can then use in your business plan to justify your vision for the place.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/

There is really no way for you to realise your dream of opening the lounge without researching a lot of boring stuff.  You can't just not do it because you're going to have to provide proof of being compliant with a whole lot of laws, regulations and codes before you can even open your business.  You desperately need to know how much that compliance will cost because it will dramatically affect your start-up costs.  Without the plans for the premises, you can't even begin to estimate how much fitting out the place will cost because you simply don't know what's going to be required to bring the place up to the required standard - whether that's air quality, food preparation areas, hookah cleaning areas, installing toilets and fire exits, etc.  You've budgeted for cosmetic stuff, but haven't even looked into the more mundane things.

I find it extremely odd that you have been unable to contact the real estate agent for a commercial property.  When you say that you've looked at the property you're hoping to lease, do you mean that you've been inside it when it was a previous business or that you've been inside it since it's been vacant?  How long has it been vacant?  How did you find out the rent on the property?

I'd be very wary of any lawyer who planned on taking this to trial unless they first established that pirate has sufficient assets to satisfy both any judgement being sought and any award of costs.  No-one's going to take this on contingency, so the plaintiffs would have to front all of the costs of any legal action and hope to hell that they prevail in court and that they're able to enforce any judgement in their favour.  A judgement that can't be enforced is just an expensive piece of paper.

Why would anyone "crack" unless there are imminent criminal charges on the table?  Lawsuits aren't particularly scary if you have no or few assets which can be seized to satisfy your debts.

You seriously can't project your monthly profits until you know your overheads.   You can try to predict your monthly revenue, but you're really just guessing at the number of customers you'll get.  There'll be quiet days every week, especially after you've been open for a while.  You'll form a regular customer base, but some people will only come once or twice so you need a constant influx of new customers to keep the numbers up.  There'll be times when major events are happening and people disrupt their usual Friday/Saturday night routine to attend those events instead of hanging out at the hookah bar.  If you're aiming at the college market, there'll be times when a lot of students are out of town for holidays.  

A place that's packed to capacity on Friday and Saturday night can be not worth opening on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday night.  Indoor hospitality venues can be very busy in winter and dead in summer or vice versa, depending on your local climate and what lifestyle people tend to live in different seasons.  Few hospitality businesses make the same amount week in/week out, month in/month out over the course of a year.  Some of your overheads will be patronage-dependent, but others will be fixed and need to be paid whether business is booming or dead.

You're talking about a type of social networking and there's pretty much a free social network for everything already in existence.  Many of the online dating services also offer vetting for non-romantic introductions.

It's not that I think your idea is a bad one, I'm just not sure how you'd market it in a way that it can compete with existing free and paid services.

Kickstarter's good for certain types of projects, although the fees are a bit steep.  Pre-ordering's not really a good way to fund things which have significant development costs.  Those types of projects are better financed by debt or equity.

You really need to get the information regarding the premises, licences, zoning and stuff.  There's not much point in calculating your projected cash flow and profit if you don't know what your start up costs are going to be with a high degree of accuracy. 

When you're talking to hookah bar owners, get some numbers from them about how much they're spending on complying with health regulations, indoor smoking regulations, wastage/theft/breakage, insurances, etc.  While their numbers won't be exactly the same as yours, at least it will give you some real world figures to put in your spreadsheet so that you can calculate your overheads more accurately.

So did you use the 50 BTC deposit by "nebulus" to pay back Onichan?

Good.  You need to talk to as many hookah bar owners as possible and find out what worked for them and what they'd have done differently in hindsight. 

It can be a bit more complicated than that.  The US has a habit of putting things into trade agreements to bypass the need for other nations to pass unpopular legislation in relation to certain issues (they've done this with copyright and patents stuff in the past, effectively trying to get US laws extended to other countries).  It's possible that some free trade agreements also have clauses which bind other nations to provide financial information directly to US government departments like the IRS, for instance (many national taxation authorities have reciprocal agreements with their overseas counterparts anyway).

On the other hand, the sheer number of mandatory reports made to financial intelligence services/regulators means that only a fraction can ever be fully investigated.  A lot of information gathered just sits around until something specific triggers further investigation. 

I think that's what people are overlooking.  Each of your component manufacturers will likely have different minimum runs and different lead times.  Your delivery date is to some extent defined by your slowest component manufacturer and if you want additional runs you may have to wait for them to squeeze your run in between other orders.  Do we know if BFL is even putting together the end product themselves or whether the unit assembly has been contracted out?  Small businesses often use the Dell model to save on the costs of multiple handling, storage of components not yet able to be used, renting physical space for longer than is absolutely necessary, etc.

He's not even coming close to "extortion". He's perfectly free to state that he's not going to pay certain people or that he's not going to pay anyone at all.  Those people are perfectly free to pursue legal remedies to obtain payment, but there are a multitude of ways in which he could fuck with that if he really wanted to and pretty much leave people who haven't been paid having to sue those who have been paid in order to recover funds.

Yes, you should go after him with lawyers, and one of the first things those lawyers should be looking at is freezing his non-Bitcoin assets.  If he's smart, he'll only have minimal non-Bitcoin assets.  You could try to obtain an order to freeze his known Bitcoin addresses, but no-one external can enforce such an order so he'd really only be risking contempt of court if he didn't comply - assuming you could prove to the satisfaction of a court that he actually controls those addresses - and the possible penalties for contempt of court will vary by jurisdiction.

What no-one can control is where any investigation leads.  You can't say to the SEC/the US Attorney's Office that you want pirate investigated for wire fraud and the like but that you don't want the PPT operators investigated.  That's not your call.   Should they investigate, they'll decide who to investigate and for what offences.

Yes and no.  While ponzi operators may have little to show at the end of the day, they often get to live large on other people's money for a period of time before the scheme collapses.  The operator of Zeek rewards transferred tens of millions to himself and family members and some of that will never be recovered.  

It's also not as if every small time ponzi operator ends up facing criminal prosecution.  Many will end up bankrupt at worst and plenty prepare for that eventuality.

Only some people have contracts with pirate, many others have contracts with the PPT operators.  While people can probably prove the elements of offer, acceptance and consideration, there could still be problems with enforcing.  Courts will not enforce contracts for things which are illegal in their jurisdiction, so some (or even all) aspects of the contracts people have with pirate or the PPT operators may be unenforceable.  It is up to the plaintiffs to prove their claims and that means proving that pirate controlled the addresses to which they sent their BTC.