Poor John Rogers. The former CEO of Pay By Touch can't pin the fall of his online-payments startup, which raised $340 million and employed 750 people before going bankrupt. This self-aggrandizing outlaw has no one but himself to blame.
Seven former NFL football players — including Drew Bledsoe — are suing UBS, a Swiss bank, for investing their money in collapsed electronic-payments firm Pay By Touch. They claim the bank neglected to mention that Pay By Touch's founder, alleged cocaine addict John Rogers, was once charged with a felony. We'd love to know how an investment bank's lawyers would have framed this disclaimer in legalese.Before he raised some $300 million for Pay By Touch, and then pissed it away on ill-thought-out acquisitions, John Rogers was charged with destroying an ex-girlfriend's kitchen and threatening to make her life a "living hell." (The conviction, the company liked to note, was converted from a felony to a misdemeanor.) If you're a football fan, you know the plaintiffs' names — Drew Bledsoe, Rick Mirer, Craig Nall, Alex Van Pelt and Mark Campbell. If you're not, just believe me when I say they were about as good on the football field as they are with their money. (Photo by AP/Widman)
Biometrics payments firm Pay By Touch shuttered for good yesterday. The last remaining client retailers will unplug their Pay By Touch fingerprint payment machines Thursday morning, a tipster tells us. He goes on to say, "I hope that piece of shit John Rogers goes to jail." Wishful thinking: Past run-ins with the legal system don't seem to have taught him anything.
Biometrics payments firm Pay By Touch is selling assets in "a mad scramble to recover any money whatsoever that our convicted Google stardom dreaming leader John Rogers pissed away," a tipster tells us. One of those assets was Pay By Touch subsidiary ATM Direct, a business Alex Muse and other Texas investors were hoping to acquire. But that didn't happen. To explain why, Muse wrote a post to his Texas Startup Blog. It's critical of Pay By Touch. Critical enough that Pay By Touch chief Thomas Lumsden threatened Muse with a lawsuit if he didn't remove it. Below, we've reposted the whole thing.
A tipster tells us top management at Pay By Touch, the biometrics payments firm run into the ground by felon John Rogers and now struggling in bankruptcy, has auctioned off its "core assets" in an attempt to pay off creditors. That may not be the case: On Friday, a party of creditors filed a restraining order with a court in Los Angeles to prevent management from "shutting down the operations of Pay By Touch Payment Solutions" — its main business. A shutdown, presumably, would only come after a failed attempt to sell the operation. How touching that someone still wants Pay By Touch to stay in business.
Remember John Rogers, the former CEO of Pay By Touch? He's morally and financially bankrupt. He's a once-convicted felon with addiction problems and a taste for threatening strangers and lovers alike. Rogers is, in other words, the type of guy only a mother could love. But now, even she's had it. Though Rogers remains on Pay By Touch's board, his mother, Judy Nelson, is out as Pay By Touch HR head, marking the end of a controversial tenure.
The financially and morally bankrupt John Rogers remains involved with the company he founded, Pay By Touch employees learned during an all-hands meeting Friday. Though the company no longer employs the once-convicted felon and confirmed bully, Rogers will remain on the board of directors. How could this be?
Failed biometrics payments firm Pay By Touch has filed voluntarily for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and will sell subsidiaries ATM Direct and CardSystems, employees learned during an all-hands on Friday. During the meeting, Pay By Touch COO Eula Adams asked employees to remain positive. Then he virtually assured that wouldn't happen by explaining the company's payroll situation.
Michael Barnes, the president of NorhTec, a computer hardware maker, says he's been royally stiffed by Pay By Touch, the troubled biometrics company now under court supervision. Stiffed to the tune of $3 million in promised orders, including more than half a million dollars in unpaid shipments. Former Pay By Touch CEO John Rogers left behind not just 750 angry employees with jobs on the line, and investors whose $300 million in funding looks unlikely to return much. To that list of aggrieved parties add suppliers like Barnes, who filled orders for the failing company but say they haven't been paid. Perversely, Barnes is rooting for the company to make a comeback, if only so he'll have a chance of getting what he's owed. Here's Barnes's story:
An ex-employee tell us that before his departure, former Pay By Touch CEO John Rogers shopped the company around to investors for $5 a share. (The company isn't publicly traded, but has issued shares to investors and employees.) It didn't seem like much until I took a closer look at Rogers's bankruptcy filling — specifically item 10 on page 21.
We got a hold of former Pay By Touch CEO John Roger's public bankruptcy filing. In the document, Rogers had to declare his remaining personal assets. And for a guy who celebrated his 40th birthday with a cake decorated "240 by 40" — celebrating the fact that he'd raised $240 million in financing for his companies by age 40 — he's doesn't have a lot to show for it. There's $1,275.68 in a Schwab account, $93.23 in a UBS account, $4,335.21 at Wells Fargo Bank, an $8,000 security deposit with his landlord, $2,000 in household goods, and $2,500 worth of clothing to his name. But no wonder, considering the monthly expenses John Rogers detailed in the filing. Spending $1,000 on clothes each month really adds up. He owes American Express a grand total of $68,272.67. And there's more, too.
Pay By Touch, the biometrics firm run into the ground by cocaine addict and convicted felon John Rogers, is accelerating plans to lay off 49 employees. Originally scheduled for this week and next, the layoffs are happening early, a tipster tells us, so that Pay By Touch won't have to issue Friday's paychecks to the affected employees. An all-hands meeting is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. today.
Employees smart enough to flee the sinking ship known as Pay By Touch are getting their comeuppance. While the new custodial rule of Tom Lumsden has managed to raise $9 million, part of which is earmarked for six weeks of missed paychecks during founder John Rogers' last hurrah, he's not wasting pennies on deserters. A tipster forwarded us an email exchange between a "screwed employee," who was originally told ex-employees would be paid back wages alongside the suckers, and Pay By Touch HR executive Judy Nelson. Here's the key piece of the email:
Wondering who was willing to put up $9 million to bail out Pay By Touch, the troubled San Francisco biometrics firm? Current backers, collectively holding $96 million in debt, are Och-Ziff Capital Management Group, Denarius Touch and Plainfield Asset Management. What's that old saying about throwing good money? [VentureBeat]
Pay By Touch CEO John Rogers is definitely out of the troubled San Francisco biometrics company, an employee tipster tells us. But the new boss, COO Eula Adams, may not be all that better. "From an employee perspective, in regard to stock options, Adams may be worse than Rogers, as hard as that may be to believe," he writes. He explains this sentiment in a long email. Here's the short version.
Who's the lucky chap appointed by the Delaware Chancery Court to oversee the mess that is Pay By Touch? That'd be Tom Lumsden, senior managing director at advisory firm FTI Consulting. He's spent 29 years getting companies shipshape, and if his leaked memo is any indication, he's all about getting things done. He's been on the job for maybe four business days and has already secured $9 million to help Pay By Touch do important things like pay employees.
You can't say nobody saw Pay By Touch's demise coming. Remember the recent college grad Pay By Touch CEO John Rogers said he would sic a former Israeli secret agent on? Here's an executive summary of the paper he wrote back in 2004 titled "Credit Card Fraud, Biometrics, and the Pay By Touch Method."
