LOL
Because I had a short break from work, and Iâm livid about the âapologyâ he made, I took the time to translate what he said into what a non-sociopathic, genuine apology would have looked like, one that didnât involve perpetuating old lies and making up new ones.
His âapologyâ/âadmissionâ:
as promised to vegabomb after last nights chat.
here is the receipt of 2nd payment (a physical copy is being sent to my address as well)
as for the rest, I am sure most of you have come to the conclusion that it has not yet been paid. as a result, i have stepped out of the yoyo making scene and have devoted my time to correcting this injustice. I have been job searching and looking to take out a loan to cover all damages. I am keeping touch with members of the forum to verify this (vegabomb and CJ as well as others). i am of course open to widening this list.
Sorry doesnât cover it. i know it doesnât. i have wronged the community in a way i know is unforgivable and acknowledge that i will more than likely be hated for the rest of the foreseeable future. i never intended for it to be this way. i have let down a lot of people and allowed my ignorance to turn what was supposed to be a great thing into a nightmare. im not asking for forgiveness. i am asking for you to let me fix this. i have already disbanded my team and am selling what i can to a friend. i will post updates as i get them as soon as i get them, and expect those i keep touch with to do the same.
What he might have said if he ditched the lying and had decided to be straightforward about this:
Sorry that vegabomb had to text me again this afternoon to compel me to fulfill the promise I made yesterday that I would write this morning.
Here is a copy of the only donation I have made to date. (a physical copy is being sent to my address as well) I know I made the donation in my name, rather than in everyoneâs name like I promised. Sorry about that. Just to be clear, I still owe the ACS $3150.
As for the rest, Iâm sure most of you have come to the conclusion that I spent it. In other words, I stole it. As a result of being caught stealing and because I know that I have committed multiple felonies and because I know that no one will do business with me anyway, I have stepped out of the yoyo making scene and have devoted my time to finding a way to pay back the money I stole. I have been job searching and looking to take out a loan to cover the money I stole. I am keeping in touch with members of the forum to verify this (vegabomb and CJ as well as others). I am of course open to widening this list.
Sorry doesnât cover all the lying and the stealing of a stash charity money that was supposed be donated to help save peoples lives. i know it doesnât. i have wronged the community in a way i know is unforgivable and acknowledge that i will more than likely be hated for the rest of the foreseeable future. i never intended to steal the money and spend it on personal things that I am refusing to disclose here. i have let down a lot of people and allowed my willingness to rob people to turn what was supposed to be a great thing into a nightmare. im not asking for forgiveness. i am asking for you to let me pay back the money I stole. My team already quit so that they wouldnât be associated with the theft I committed and I am selling what i can to a friend. i will post updates as i get them as soon as i get them, and expect those i keep touch with to do the same.
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You know what? I still stand by what I said. Itâs money. People do stupid things. People get butthurt. Even if he did donate money, thereâs no guarantee that it would change anything. If people are going to hate me, so be it. You can twist my words all you want, but itâs not going to change my mind. If I was to meet Heath tomorrow, I wouldnât hate him. People have done worse things. He donated more money to me than I ever have.
Get pissed all you want, but weâre different people. We see things differently, and we always will.
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He didnât donate any if his own money. We gave him 4300 to take and donate. Along the way he decided to spend our money and only donate a small portion of what we gave him to donate.
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Yes, but if it wasnât for him, there wouldâve been no auctions. NOTHING wouldâve been donated. Like I said in my first post (which some are overlooking), it wasnât cool what he did. At least he donated something of it though rather then spend it all on himself. As with some of the posts above said, it now looks like heâs working to get it all to ACS. If that happens good.
Let me just say though⌠If Heath decides to sell more of his stuff to help get the funds, I will gladly buy from him, as I support vsnyyc for their yoyos, not their staff. If I like what I play, Iâll get it.
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Sorry didnât mean to thank you, i wanted to quote you. No offense. Phones still havenât progressed to properly select touched items.
From what I gathered from reading these posts, it wasnât just money, it was yoyos as well that were stolen. Am I correct to say that yoyos were donated by different manufacturers to support the cause?
Iâm not hating on you but be in anotherâs shoes. If you were to donate, you expect it to go straight to the cause, not to some middleman that used money that wasnât his to buy lazer guns and other misc crappy toys. I suppose that is how this situation should have been handled in the first place.
Following your logic, if nobody contributed anything to the ACS from the time of its conception, my mother would have died from a rare form of cancer when I was 11 years old. Trust me, that was a happy 11 year old when I found out she would live another 17 years.
I personally am not asking anyone to hate Heath. I would like to point out that he is not the kind of person you want to give money (or the like) to be then handed to someone else. This is because X amount of money was in good faith given to him and he then did as he wished not as he promised. This is a lie. You make your own friends, but if you do not acknowledge that repeating this would be a bad idea that makes you foolish.
[quote=âPreinfalk,post:106,topic:43516â]
But it appears he did spend it all on himself. He only donated anything after he was called out by the community and even then it seems like he was waiting for a recent source of income to do that. It wasnât out of the goodness of his heart, his motivation was only to cover his back after the proverbial poo hit the fan. Heâs working to pay it all off cause heâs realised just how much trouble he might be in.
If youâre going to judge someone, as everyone is doing here, then motivation is just as, if not more so, important than the actual effects of their actions.
Make sure he sends first!
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Itâs not surprising when I see comments I disagree with. I should probably stay out of it, but itâs hard not to respond.
No, you wonât get the yo-yo. Why? Because Heath wonât send it. Heâll pocket your money, and when you ask him where your yo-yos are, heâll ignore you email, your forum private message, and your Facebook message. Your money will be gone, just like the charity money, probably spent on a laser tag gun. The only way youâll get a resolution is when he wants to sell more yo-yos. Only then will he say that heâs already shipped your yo-yo, or that he didnât ship it because he was waiting for you to decide if you wanted to buy a second yo-yo. Heâll play the victim and apologize for being too nice. He did this to several of the charity auction winners.
You donât get to keep the yo-yos when you die. When you die, the yo-yos wonât care who you were or what you did during your life. People are different. People care. And thatâs why itâs important to care about the people in your life. Iâm 27. Part of getting older is that Iâve had several experiences with dishonest people. Going to court, suing people, have my stuff stolen. Itâs no fun. Life is too short to spend my time dealing with dishonest people. It doesnât matter how âgoodâ their product is. Enabling dishonest behavior through purchasing decisions harms you and it harms people you care about who may also be connected to that person.
It may not be today, it may not be tomorrow - but I sincerely hope you rethink your position regarding which companies you support and why.
What complicates this situation is that the evidence is spread over several hundred forum pages, auction pages, e-mails, telephone transcripts, forum messages, and PayPal receipts. I understand why itâs difficult for any single person to have a clear and complete understanding of Heathâs behavior over the last 2 years.
I donât need to review the full extent of his behavior here. The information isnât hard to find â thereâs just a lot of it, and I canât hope to effective describe it in one post.
When I read someone niggling that âno deadline was setâ â itâs clear to me that the writer hasnât closely followed Heathâs behavior. This is not about missing a deadline. This is about a clearly established, extraordinary pattern of lies and deception. The extraordinary part is especially important. He lies often, and he lies flagrantly. He doesnât simply say something that is untrue. His tactics are more subtle and deliberate than that. Here are a few.
Letâs take this post as an example: Vs. Newton YoYo Concepts: Andrew Maider wins MA States! - #600 by jrodriguez - Up & Coming Manufacturers - YoYoExpert
In this section, he casts himself as a champion of the people while at the same time playing the victim.
This is an outright lie, made more believable by the emotional appeal in the first paragraph.
This is also an outright lie. There is no âlocal guy who has agreed from the beginning to match a percentage.â This âlocal guyâ has never been mentioned in any other âthe worksâ charity thread. He does not say what percentages âthe local guyâ is matching. Remember, the second set of eBay auctions finished in August. This post is from September 25th. When Heath wrote it, over a month had passed since those auctions ended. He is blaming a fictitious, anonymous âlocal guyâ instead of accepting responsibility himself.
In this section, he undercuts the first apology by playing the victim âIâm sorry if you didnât receive enough free string.â He reiterates the Hero / Champion of the People act. He apologizes for many things, for not being the best âdefenderâ â again, playing the victim.
This post is just one example. In others, he questions the credibility of people who ask why he hasnât sent a yo-yo in 6 months.
To date, Heath has never admitted to stealing. When given the opportunity to admit his clear guilt, he chose instead, in the face of unambiguous evidence, to write a carefully worded post admitting only that âmany people believe that the money has not been paid.â He mentions an injustice in his post. In the context of the post, the injustice is referring to other peopleâs beliefs â not his own behavior. It is unjust that people believe that he didnât donate the money. He apologizes for his âignoranceâ â not for his deception. In this context, ignorance could mean his inability to find a receipt from a presumed 1st donation, or it could mean his ignorance that people needed to see it.
In any case, Heathâs âconfessionâ or at least the closest thing to a confession we have to date â displays a shocking but familiar contempt for the readerâs intelligence. The post implies the existence of a first donation without outright stating it. Building misleading assumptions into text is a very common tactic in advertising and politics when you want to control a discussion or influence a group of people. Most of the time, people discuss the validity of facts or opinions of a work â not the body of assumptions that the work is founded on.
There is good evidence that Heath habitually lies, that Heath will manipulate others to fulfill selfish objectives, and that Heath doesnât truly care about manipulating or hurting people. It is exactly because he doesnât care that heâs so effectively able to charismatically lie, even in the face of mounting evidence. Heâs effective because a new person, without seeing the pattern of behavior, simply would not believe that guilty person could act with such disdain and apathy. Thatâs what makes his behavior extraordinary â and because it is extraordinary, thereâs a name for it: sociopathy.
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Whatâs worse than being a sociopath, heâs a narcissist. Who hosts a contest with the task being to draw his own portrait? Vain, vain, vain, vain, vain! Thereâs a reason, too, why the Amish grow beards but not mustachesâitâs because of the possibility of a nice mustache going to a manâs headâas it clearly has done for Heath. Not everyone can grow a great mustache, but he can so he thinks that makes him a public benefactor. No. Go to you-know-where. Youâre just as pretty as a peacock and just as pointless, with no place on the Thanksgiving dinner table; and certainly no place in this community.
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Flyguy perfectly said
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I just want to throw some stuff in there for consideration. Iâve had family die of cancer as well and even though I couldnât afford the auction I did follow it here and there. I wish it would have worked out differently.
Iâm on a phone so I will make use of jrods post. Ty jrod!
I just read through 252 pages on yyn, and reread yye posts and some pages on YoYoSkills.
I may just be speculating but I think there is evidence here.
His âapologyâ/âadmissionâ:
as promised to vegabomb after last nights chat.
here is the receipt of 2nd payment (a physical copy is being sent to my address as well)
and they only payment made. More or less probably the money from the last things he auctioned, or close to. In fact he most definitely would have kept this as well had he not been caught.
as for the rest, I am sure most of you have come to the conclusion that it has not yet been paid. as a result, i have stepped out of the yoyo making scene and have devoted my time to correcting this injustice.
why would you step out if you hadnât done it? Why give up an entire company and your hard work so easily. I wouldnât if I hadnât done it. I would have produced the evidence immediately. Unless it was deliberate from day one and now itâs time to sell everything and run. The injustice is what he caused not anybody else and yes the team quit him. He did not disband anything. This is the admission of guilt however disguised he wanted to put it.
I have been job searching and looking to take out a loan to cover all damages.
This is the most disturbing part to me. Heâs made how much money from the community in over priced YoYos that he has to look for a job AND get a loan to pay back a measly $4300 that he probably has in his bank account right now. Sorry $3000+ because of the donation made. Unless he is really not making that much money on the YoYos he sells. If he isnât making that much money then think about this. From what Iâve heard or gather, most criminals well sit on a stolen item or money till everything blows over. Heath concluded the auction in December and finished getting the money in late January at which time the donation was supposed to be made. But he figured if no one asked for receipts then he was Scott free after a few months. He had a âlimitedâ run of skyWalkers that he sold as the 2nd run and he bought a bunch of things on Ebay and supported his family and team and still found the money to open a new shop on may 21, 2012. All on YoYos that donât make him enough money so he has to get a job and get a loan? Either his YoYos make money and he can afford to pay, but wonât because he is a thief and is running, or they donât and he stole the money for the down payment on his shop. But both canât be true and both nail this as deliberate and he is a conartist. So you might ask yourself why he, if he is a thief, did he make any payment? Because it wasnât out of his pocket, it was from the last auction he had that he just finished up, and he made the donation and asked us to give him time to make the rest of it with a new job and loan (so he could run or disappear from the YoYo community)
I am keeping touch with members of the forum to verify this (vegabomb and CJ as well as others). i am of course open to widening this list.
or keep tabs on how much we know
Sorry doesnât cover it. i know it doesnât. i have wronged the community in a way i know is unforgivable and acknowledge that i will more than likely be hated for the rest of the foreseeable future.
why would he be hated if it was a simple mistake and he just fixed it. The foreseeable future suggests heâs not coming back. He is running.
i never intended for it to be this way.
but all the evidence shows differently.
i have let down a lot of people and allowed my ignorance to turn what was supposed to be a great thing into a nightmare.
The nightmare that you got caught.
Iâm not asking for forgiveness. i am asking for you to let me fix this.
He means RUN!
i have already disbanded my team and am selling what i can to a friend.
You mean selling all that equipment canât pay for the auction money? Or selling to a friend because if you go to jail, the state canât take anything away?
i will post updates as i get them as soon as i get them, and expect those i keep touch with to do the same.
He is a conartist! Throw his butt in jail. This is just to obvious. I got all this info from the Yoyonation forum and all you have to do is but read it and piece together the time tables peoples. YoYoSkills.com put out a timetable and links to all the forum pages. People have also been having problems with heath scamming them on YoYos bought from his website for the last 2 years. Iâm done
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Dude⌠he STOLE OVER 3000 BUCKS!!! From the cancer society- and from all the players who bought the yo-yos!!!
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Seriously. What. in. the. ##%$. are. you. talking. about?
This has to be the most absurd argument Iâve ever read on any forum anywhere, ever.
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Iâm with you guys, his statement on the matter is bizarre and border-line crazy.
Some people find the word you had in there a bit offensive.
vegabomb
correct. this is not about making a cool yoyo. this is about mail fraud and theft.
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So whatâs going on with the yye store? Is Andre going to keep vsnyyc up till he sells all the rest of the vsnyyc t shirts and buckles? Our is he taking a loss on them since there is no more company and given the severity of this situation? You know he could hold his own donation to ACS.
Heath needs to make it right, but I donât trust him to do so without involving the law and something like that can take forever. How about we take action instead of hoping for Heath to come around? How about we do something right now?
I donât know for sure, but Iâd assume YYE owns their stock. So, that is still Andreâs stuff to sell regardless of whatâs actually happening with Heath.
I donât really wish any ill on Andre or the store, so I think itâs totally fair if they keep those items up until they sell. They do not have any responsibility for this situation and demanding they take a loss on the items is not really helping anybody.