That was inevitably coming, given the huge monthly residuals some "retailers" had accumulated from day one when Charlie made his business model one of scammery, or at least the taking on of scammers to garner as many subscriber signups as he could get, as quickly as they could be scored. These were folks hawking DiSH who basically just dumped hardware on people and helpfully "pre-activated" their rx's, which triggered their activation payments and of course the start of promised high resids. It's easy to do a lot of activations if you're not doing service along with them that makes for true satisfaction. The established, steady, full-service full-satisfaction dealers were effectively paid less by DiSH than the scammers because they put themselves into and stood behind every service activation they did with quality installation and responsive service, which meant they did fewer of them. But Charlie thought it an existential deal to rack up his first few 100,000 quickly to get "deals" from the programmers. Charitably, he just didn't think things through well enough, and there really wasn't that kind of crisis to sink or swim, to sacrifice one's integrity. Not so charitably, he's a scammer at heart himself.
Predictably this quickly blew up on him, with people getting activated but not installed, and worse, and his answer was to tar all of us as crooks and start implementing more and more "business rules" designed to trip up (and charge back) scammers but which in practice harmed the "good" dealers as well. On and on this "death by 1,000 cuts" went, for years. Another response from him was to shed as much of the big resids as he could, both by nitpicking for contract violations as well as apparently just stopping paying them. Claude was one of those it hit big, and I was one of those it hit relatively small. We both got $1000s in a class action lawsuit, and Claude of course went from DiSH darling to persona non grata.
I witnessed Claude's transformation through this time, through his dealer board. He was not always a "grizzled" grudgeholder as some may have perceived him. Quite the opposite. He was youthful, curious, funny. A kid. Before the problems.
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