Fired Worker’s Old Company Tries to “Blackmail” Them

You can pretty much always tell when a person, company, business, organization, or any kind of entity is trying to keep something “off the books” so to speak.

If there’s a, let’s say certain amount of money your manager says that they’re going to pay you and they don’t put that in writing via email or in an official contract or offer letter, you always run the risk of being onboarded at a different rate.

Or if an employer is asking you to do something that is a little unsavory, or if they are trying to strong-arm you using tactics that could be considered or are blatantly defined to be illegal, Then they will probably urge you to discuss such discrepancies and person are over the phone and they may speak vaguely while doing so.

However, there are a number of Reddit users who are saying that a fellow user on the site’s former boss basically gave them written evidence that they were attempting to blackmail them.

User @Tatersalad9151 posted that they worked for a company that fired them, and when they did they ended up deleting their work email address.

What the company didn’t count on however is that their work email account contained a lot of information that was crucial to the operation of the business’ e-commerce model.

Now, imagine you are running a business where this happened, and in order to ensure that the company’s e-commerce revenue streams flow as per usual, and a recently fired employee is a huge part of that, how would you go about reactivating those e-commerce lines?

Would you reach out to the recently fired employee for a contract payment plan in order to re-establish those lines? Or would you take available staff and maybe higher some other short-term employees to go and redo all of the work at the former employee did to fix the mistake that your company made?

Well, according to OP, the business didn’t select either of those aforementioned options: they decided instead to send a “threatening” email to the recently fired worker, telling them that they have to come in and clean up the “mess they made” or that they would talk smack about them to OP’s new employer.

The Redditor’s former coworker writes: “I am glad to hear that you got the new position from [redacted] which is a large company that I could look for some help with or make the complaint to.”

They continue: “I would definitely give you enough change to clear up all the messes you have done with [redacted] you were using third-party software to destroy the company’s Amazon account and do a pretty ugly thing to us.If you want to keep me quiet, you have to fix all the things including product recall.”

OP’s former manager also went on to accuse them of faking sick notes from doctors in order to get out of work. “Otherwise, I will have many things to talk to your HR people including all the fake sick notes from your doctors. Maybe I could call your previous employer that you did similar ugly things to get some alliance to make your case stronger.”

They Ended their message by giving a timeline of how long OP had to respond to their message: “This notice is valid for a whole month, I will have to report to someone from [redacted] if I have not heard anything from you.”

In the comments section of the post, OP appears to have told other users that they brought the matter to the attention of their neighbor who happens to be an attorney. This could be a reason why the Reddit user may have ultimately deleted the post from the website.

Also in the comments, OP also denies ever faking any sick notes from doctors, listing that all of their names are freely available to research online.

A number of users remarked that they believed the message OP’s former company sent to them is a clear case of blackmail. There are others who couldn’t believe that whoever sent the message left a paper trail of the threat.