Well this happens all too often in the industry, not paying people what they are owed.

I have a brother-in-law who does work in California for 911 CAD systems as a federal contractor and his business is subcontracted out by a contractor that can't do the work but won the bid. Often he tells me this other company won't pay him, and then he cannot pay his employees and has to find the owner and ask him to write the check. Sometimes the owner writes the check but does not sign it, and he has to go back and get him to sign it. He says this thing happens all too often with contracts.

Now accountants and web administrators also are hired on contracts and sometimes they don't get paid either. In this case the web administrator had access to their web site and inserted that notice.

There was someone I knew called Michael David Crawford who was a software contractor and he would do programming gigs for designing firmware and other advanced programming. He wrote on a series of web sites about the places that didn't pay him like Manpower, Drobo and others, even posting email from managers to blogs and his web sites as proof. One manager and lawyer he posted about at Drobo had the diary/blog he wrote at Kuro5hin taken down with a cease and desist letter. He had posted a series of emails from them to prove what he was trying to say, and they censored him and threated to sue him over it. Sadly Michael went through a tough time, his wife divorced him, he couldn't find any contract work, could not collect on money owed to him on contracts for work he did, he started to go mad. He protested by disrupting Dotcom events at the Hacker Dojo and in Portland:

http://startupweekend.org/2012/04/30/not-even-bmob-threats-c...

http://www.reddit.com/r/michaeldavidcrawford/comments/ur825/...

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2012/04/startup...

I don't know why he did those things, he considers himself a hacktivist, and he has startup experience and even worked as a software consultant for Apple and a few other big names as well in his career. (Mac System 7.5.X he worked on, he said his name is in an easter egg in some of the versions)

I mean Michael was on CNN talking about the tax problem software consultants face, and about the Joe Stack incident: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhLV7jydPJ8 of course CNN buried the interview and Rick Sanchez was no longer at CNN, but someone captured it for Youtube. He spoke out against using violence or threats of violence during that interview. He mentioned that he would often get stiffed by the client in that interview. But after that he was marked by authorities and wasn't paid for his works and virtually blacklisted for speaking out. He even had his worked cited by startups http://www.bearcave.com/misl/misl_tech/venture_capital.html

From what I know he has been homeless and in and out of jail and a mental hospital. I lost contact with him before he did those things or accused of doing those things.

He is currently located here:
http://www.slosheriff.org/whoisincustody/Detail.aspx?Booking...

You can tell he is a totally different person in the CNN interview, and sometime after that he was not paid for his contracts and they were terminated short-term, and then all these bad things happened to him, and before I know it he is protesting Startup events, and the like. I think he couldn't afford his medication because he was homeless and without work. He often said as a software contractor they would go without work and being stiffed by clients, but still owe the money to the IRS because it is income even if he isn't paid for it.

After he lost his contracts and couldn't collect on money owed him that he was stiffed on, his web sites got taken down, and then auctioned off, and they had the only evidence on them that could have cleared him and proven his mistreatment. I think some domain squatters got them because they were at the top of certain Google searches and they bought the domains for high traffic advertising.

The mystery is this isn't the first time he's been in that jail, he was in before and no charges listed, and 90 days later he was released, only to be rearrested over and over again and released, and then finally they got some charge of threatening with intent to terrorize or something. I have no idea why. I think it is a BS charge like they did with Aaron Swartz and others, but I am not 100% sure on that.

I thought I would cite his case as it is relevant to the topic as a worse case scenario that happens when one isn't paid for their contracted work.