I've posted about my situation before, but the same general topic keeps coming up.... I was hired to build a website and somehow it turned into a B2B startup after 4 years - and I alone was 95% of the staff. "Cash flow problems" I was told, "can't hire anyone else right now"...

When the CEO was caught blatantly lying to a customer to make a sale, it became clear about the totality of the situation - he's a full blown sociopath, I just hadn't put it all together, but kept picking up clues. Then the guy who introduced me to him finally told me about how this CEO deliberately got fired from Goodyear in France back in the 80s, when such a thing was impossible (France's unemployment laws and all), he then moved to England and defrauded the French government of unemployment insurance for over a year. The amount of risk taking there...! Like I said, Patrick Bateman from American Psycho isn't much of an exaggeration of this guy's behavioral patterns and character. I'm serious... Then I realized how I'd been manipulated for 4 years.

I was so fried after all the stress I didn't think through things enough and I quit, after some months of hassle dealing with his wife over getting paid for the outstanding invoices. She was Marie Antoinette Macbeth... 4 years of my life down the drain.

I'm in a bit of a pickle now as I'm still burnt out, and am finding it hard to get interviews or survive them. I'm too old to get some worker bee job in a tech company now, I fear, and I can't stand IT at some level. This is one hell of a mid life crisis...

But my conscience is clear. The rational thing to do would have been to keep working there and overcharge them on the hourly rate, which I could have without any trouble (given I was 90% of the It staff with no supervision). But then I'd be playing their game... But I could have spent my time mostly looking for another job. But the stress and everything else... I'd be waking up every morning pissed as hell. Not a good thing. I sort of wish I had now, but it's because things are getting dicey for me on a personal level. I have the resources to stay afloat for another year, so I'm shouldn't complain but I hate burning savings.

So my advice is think this through first and decide how to find another job or what you will do before quitting. I was too impulsive. I can relate to the 'blood, sweat and tears" too since I realized the founders were lazy people who let me do all the work and didn't give a damn about anything but money (this was a 4 person company, and I the only one w/o equity). but you have to let it go - if you don't have any equity, and the people you deal with have no ethics, you will get screwed every which way, even for the sheer fun of it possibly. What's to stop them from manipulating you? People like this do not have any internal brakes on what they will do or rationalize away. How do you know this is the only morally bankrupt decision they have made?

To actually answer your question, how have you been legally impacted by their actions? I'm not sure you could make a case. If you have equity, then figure out how to extract yourself without triggering their alarm bells that you're leaving because you know they are bastards. If you don't have any sort of financial stake in the company (like I did) and can't claim damages (e.g. I was paid for my time, just constantly late), then walk away. I couldn't make a case that I had any claim to equity or etc. The law does not care about philosophical stuff like ethical treatment of employees or contractors unless the situation is very clear cut, like sexual harassment. Manipulation of people is entirely legal. So if there is no money involved, or broken contracts, you don't have any legal avenues.

I do wish I had thought things through and been better able to reveal to the customer who got screwed about the situation - I ended up saving the contract by writing the system to generate the data they thought they'd paid for, but I was in a bind - either not do that and have the customer sue the company (and never get my invoices paid) or do this and get my invoices paid and then quit. Do you feel any sense of responsibility or guilt about what was done? You shouldn't. I did, now that I realize this, and that drove my actions (unconsciously). I would do so many things differently now...

so perhaps you can inform the person who was impersonated somehow? Then your sense of duty to do something has been dealt with and the people directly affected can decide what to do.