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Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

(medium.com)
1121 points alokedesai | 2 comments | 28 Oct 15 19:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.441s | source
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enraged_camel ◴[28 Oct 15 20:41 UTC] No.10467246[source]▶
I'm pretty sure I know what's going on. In order to pay off their debts, Homejoy must have sold user account information, including credit cards, to a bunch of local home cleaning businesses. A shit ton of them have been popping around over the past couple of years, modeled after the advice given in this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/entrepreneurridealong

The difference with these local cleaning businesses is that they are developed and ran by amateurs, who often times copy each other (or the successful giants) down to the wording on the websites, with minor branding changes. They tend to be super low-budget, so Fly Maids probably paid some "web developer" $500 to develop their website and paid zero attention to security, PCI compliance, and so on. They then purchased a bunch of LA-based user accounts from the now-defunct Homejoy, who of course did not perform any due diligence.

Shitty situation to be sure. I definitely lost respect for the Homejoy founders, and will probably stay away from their next venture.

replies(2): >>10467378 #>>10469494 #
1. djur ◴[28 Oct 15 21:02 UTC] No.10467378[source]▶
How is it possibly legal to sell credit card details to a third party?
replies(1): >>10468999 #
2. geofft ◴[29 Oct 15 03:10 UTC] No.10468999[source]▶
It makes sense in many cases: when, say, Verizon Wireless acquired Alltel, an Alltel customer who has automatic monthly billing set up shouldn't be required to re-set up billing with Verizon, simply because it's a new company.

It's not clear to me that the same intuition applies if the Alltel equivalent is shutting down because it was mismanaged, and the Verizon equivalent was created by one of the mismanagers and has no other assets, but it's hard for me to imagine there's a meaningful legal distinction.