He was employed by me, straight from University, at a Web Conferencing company based in Chichester. Initially he was keen, eager to learn and as a result earned an extremely good salary and commission - especially for a raw graduate. Unfortunately, his initial success went to his head and comments such as "well I know what I'm worth and my dad has just arranged a mortgage for a guy who works for WebEx and they keep trying to poach me..." started to get dropped into our monthly meeting. My response was always "I'm sure that's true James, but you must realise that holding a gun to my head is rather like the boy that cried wolf".
After about a year we took on two additional employees in sales roles, which James was overjoyed with as we could now build a team. Unfortunately, his competitive nature got in the way and he started manipulating our CRM system (Salesforce) and falsifying records to his own advantage. Needless to say he was "caught with his hand in the till" and I was completely thrown by his dishonesty after having treated him so well. I gave him the opportunity to come clean, apologise and take any punishment. To my amazement he denied that he had done anything untoward and was completely at a loss to understand why I should question him. When I showed him the proof (beware any young sales guys reading this - Salesforce has an audit trail capability!) he looked very sheepish and suddenly remembered that he had indeed falsified the CRM records and his excuse was that he was ultra competitive and thought he would be the person best able to deal with that particular sales opportunity. He was given his first stern warning. That evening he sent a txt message saying how foolish he had been and how utterly miserable he felt at betraying the trust that had been placed in him.
He was caught falsifying Salesforce records twice more and both times looked me squarely in the eyes and said he had no idea what I was talking about. Each time he suddenly had a remarkable memory correction when shown documentary evidence that proved him to be a liar. Again, the sheepish look and even more pitiful apology.
Suffice to say he was thereafter watched like a hawk, but foolishly he did not stop his devious acts. He was caught out at least twice with regard to emails that, due to slight misspellings, ended up in the mailserver trash folder. Again, absolute denials until shown the printouts of the emails and then the usual apologies. By this stage it was becoming increasingly difficult to trust anything that James said. He was given a further two stern warnings, the final one of which was explained so as to leave no uncertainty that he was thereafter "drinking in the last chance saloon!"
James even went so far as to get customers to renew their annual license a month or two before they were due and rather than start the license to be contiguous with their existing license he would start them immediately - in other words effectively short changing customers although appearing to be doing them a favour! Note: Our internal administration caught this little ruse early and none of our customers actually lost out.
We had a period of about 12 months (effectively 2007) when we had an unnaturally high number of unexplained disconnects during demonstrations to prospective customers. We began to notice a trend, and that was that James did not seem to experience anything like the number of disconnects that the other people did. In order to diagnose possible reasons we swapped PCs, router and switch connections, IP addresses, cameras and made a host of other changes, but we couldn't explain it. As a consequence, James was given more leads than the other sales guys and of course James was happy "to do his bit to keep sales up" and take on the responsibility for more demonstrations than the others.
Our internal efforts at eradicating the demonstration drop-outs proved to be fruitless so we enlisted the help of external networking experts who installed a couple of network sniffer applications to see what was happening. After about a week, we discussed findings with the experts and their curious report outlined that the drop-outs were in fact not spurious gremlins but standard instructions to end a conference. Their conclusion was that they were being terminated from the PC used on a daily basis by James Salisbury. It appears that James overheard this comment and immediately went into damage limitation mode by saying that he was furious at being implicated and had a mind to resign. James did resign about 2 months later (early 2008) and coincidentally we have not had any unaccountable drop-outs since then. Note: Since the early days of James's employment he had Administrator rights to all of our demonstration servers and the evidence we have is that he killed a live conference and almost simultaneously created a conference with the same name and credentials. Unfortunately, he was not caught in the act although we were closing in on him and if it wasn't James doing this then he had an application/virus activated from his PC's IP Address that was responsible.
When James resigned, that should have been the end of it. But no. James stole the company's database and other company confidential documents. Unfortunately "the law of the land is an ass" and the onus was on us to prove that he was actually using it. In a response to a letter from the company's Solicitor James apologised, claiming that it was an oversight to have stolen the database and a further oversight to have plagiarised my company's sales documents, inserted Megameeting UK Ltd's logo and passing them off as Megameeting UK Ltd's own work.
As if the above were not enough, James and his father (i.e. Stuart Salisbury, the sole listed director of Megameeting UK Ltd) then sought to negotiate, through our solicitor, for Megameeting UK Ltd only to be bound to not target our company's customers (as listed on the database that they had previously stated had been destroyed) for a period of 6 months...So having made a written declaration that a) the stolen database reports and any information associated with our customer information had been destroyed and b) undertaking not to directly approach our customers to solicit business, the next "wheeze" was to telephone targetted customers and say "Hi, it's James Salisbury here how are you? I've started a new company called Megameeting UK. I'm not supposed to be contacting you but if you drop me an email saying that you found Megameeting on a Google search for Web Conferencing software or Video conferencing and that you wanted to make contact, then I'll be able to deal with you" ... or words to that effect.Still the same James Salisbury - "why tell the truth when a lie will do?" It's difficult for a leopard to change his spots, as they say.
It may seem strange for this information to be provided above, however I have very detailed records/evidence which substantiates all of the information and as the law of the land does not provide adequate protection against theft of company confidential information you will, no doubt, understand why I stand by the headline - James Salisbury is a compulsive liar...It's a shame that his own personal greed got the better of him.
T M S
Disclaimer: This site has no link whatsoever with any USA based company, especially one called MegaMeeting.