Alternatives to ShareIt/MyCommerce/Digital River

[HBaergroy]

Wow. We knew this was coming, but it's still shocking.

[theProsecutor]

Here's a declaration issued by CEO Barry Kasoff to the employees of Digital River:

https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1jjm7pm01

Dear Team,

As you know, we have been navigating a challenging period in our business for some time now. While we’ve worked diligently to consolidate our operations and strengthen our focus on our Digital and Subscription businesses, unforeseen factors have intensified the strain on our financial resources. The rapid contraction of key customers, combined with the headwinds presented by new deals with shorter payment terms and U.S. trade policies that impacted one of our largest customers, have exacerbated the pressure on our available capital. These challenges, coupled with rising operational costs and tax obligations, have impacted our ability to sustain operations.

In response to our constrained financial position, we began exploring strategic pathways. As of January 2, 2025, Digital River became unable to tap into advanced funding of our revolving credit facility. In response, we engaged in discussions with our lenders and largest customers to source additional funding or determine an alternate solution to sustain our operations.

Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to identify a path forward that would allow Digital River to continue operating. It is with a heavy heart that we have made the incredibly difficult decision to initiate the wind down of the business, which will occur pursuant to each foreign jurisdiction’s requirements. This process began with the suspension of services to the majority of our global customers. As part of the global wind down process, today, Digital River filed an application to initiate insolvency proceedings for our German entities at the Cologne Insolvency Court. As such, a Court-appointed Preliminary Insolvency Administrator will assess the operational viability of German operations.

Globally, we expect a substantial reduction in our workforce as part of the wind down process, which will also impact our independent contractors. While some employees may remain to assist with the transition, no specific decisions have been made at this time. You will receive further information regarding the wind down process specific to your individual jurisdiction in the coming days, including details about your employment status and any other region-specific considerations. Please be assured that we do not anticipate any interruptions to current wages or benefits during this time.

Please note that we have already communicated with our customers to inform them of the wind down process. We are in ongoing conversations with certain customers to facilitate a smooth transition, which may drive variability in the duration of the wind down process for certain of our teams. We ask that you continue to escalate all inquiries from customers to your ELT lead, and refrain from commenting on the wind down or insolvency processes.

We know this news may be difficult to process. Please know that this decision was not made lightly, and it in no way reflects the immense dedication, talent, and effort each of you has contributed to Digital River. You have been the driving force behind everything we’ve achieved, and for that, we are deeply grateful.

In the days ahead, we ask for your continued professionalism and focus as we navigate this transition. We will be holding a global town hall meeting later today to provide further information and address your questions. In the meantime, if you have immediate concerns or questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your ELT lead directly.

Thank you for everything you have done for Digital River.

Sincerely,

Barry Kasoff

Poor guy. He's actually honest this time. He is honestly thanking us for the tens of millions of dollars we've donated him since July. Let's thank him too and donate him some good years in prison too.


Let’s make sure these individuals are held accountable.

We need to make a clear distinction between civil liability and criminal liability.

Civil liability is confined to the company, and recovering anything from a company that has gone bankrupt and emptied its accounts is very unlikely. This is what they’re relying on. However, if this was done intentionally, we can look into criminal liability, but that will need to be proven.

We need to approach this from a different perspective.

We had a contract. But what they’ve been selling since July was not part of that contract. They lied to us and took our products and sold them without our consent, outside the contract. This is software piracy, theft, or another similar legal term. The prosecutors will determine the exact charges.

Imagine you have a contract with someone to sell 10 licenses or physical products you created. They sell those 10 products and pay for them. But at the same time, they steal another 10 products from you, sell them under their own name, and keep all the money without paying you anything. They didn’t break the contract, they committed theft.

When it comes to providing software services, out of respect for those who want to use our products and to protect our reputation, we should continue offering the service. This also is what these individuals are relying on. But we have the right to stop providing that service at any time. The buyers didn’t purchase from us, they bought from a thief who stole our products. These individuals need to either refund the buyers or pay for the stolen products. And, of course, they must face criminal consequences for their actions.

That’s why, when we report this to the police, we need to shift the focus of the complaint. This will ensure personal responsibility for their actions.

The perpetrator will be the manager/owner of the company and the country where the criminal act was committed will be Germany.

This way, the complaint will no longer be rejected due to the lack of identification of a perpetrator, as we saw in a previous post, or due to jurisdiction.



Let’s file those reports and make sure these individuals face the consequences of their actions.



PS Please post again the details where the complaints can be filed so that more people can file or file again a complaint.

[Astronomous]

"Please note that we have already communicated with our customers to inform them of the wind down process." -- Hehehe, have not received any communication from DR about "wind down process", just promises to pay soon. Have not received any payments for July and later. This message by Barry Kasoff is plain ridiculous as it was planned fraud, otherwise we should have received some info about what was going around already in October.

The mentioned big customer, sanctioned by U.S., was likely Kaspersky, who generated them hefty renvenue.

[sft234]

Planned bankruptsy while pretending to be ok is a crime in Germany ("Insolvenzverschleppung"). This is EXACTLY what Kasoff did. This makes the limited liability of a GmbH fall away. So we can take Kasoff to court.

Btw, the site of the German Handelsregister where "Digital River GmbH" and "Digital River Holding GmbH" are listed is offline since hours already - probably overflown by accesses:

https://www.handelsregister.de/

[alexgn]

If someone starts a lawsuit because of "Insolvenzverschleppung" you can count on me as a witness.
I am not really affected myself because I disabled products a while ago and did refunds.

[sft234]

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolvenzverschleppung

https://de-m-wikipedia-org.translate.go ... r_pto=wapp

Most important grounds for claims

If the person required to file the application continues to conduct the company's business despite insolvency, the conclusion of the company's business transactions often constitutes fraud, as payment for the services received is obviously no longer possible. [ 4 ] [ 5 ] For this, as well as for damages from other typical insolvency offenses, the directors are also liable under Section 823 Paragraph 2 of the German Civil Code. [ 6 ] Negligence is sufficient.

[ssec]

What bullshit world we live in. All these emails written by AI, standard rubbish to cover your ass.

Just need to know who are the insolvency administrators now so we can apply to try recover maybe some of the money owned, but there will be nothing left.

They knew they were going to run out of money by end of January.

Barry Kasoff is a total failure he never saved one company in his life. You can see it from how he managed this period from July to now. As soon as they changed payment terms everyone should have known they were desperate.

[Jakob / Cableguys]

As unfortunate as this situation is, I’m grateful it didn’t happen right after the Black Friday sales or a new product release (I hope it's same for you!). It’s still frustrating and it sucks, but for me, there’s a sense of relief in knowing it could have been much worse.

[toha]

Perhaps it could have been worse for you. But it's not usual to turn off the lights before declaring bankruptcy.

[microserver]

but they still charge credit card from the autorenew customers. that's so shit.

[buttermilk]

Well, all we can do now is wait for their registration at:

https://www.unternehmensregister.de/ure ... anguage=en

At the moment I can't find anything related to DR using data from:

https://store.digitalriver.com/store/de ... lRiverPage

[SWRd]

but they still charge credit card from the autorenew customers. that's so shit.

Are you sure? In my cases I receive RebillingDeactivated notification only. Looks like all products has been removed.

[virtualdj]

Planned bankruptsy while pretending to be ok is a crime in Germany ("Insolvenzverschleppung"). This is EXACTLY what Kasoff did. This makes the limited liability of a GmbH fall away. So we can take Kasoff to court.

This will need some good criminal lawyers to initiate anything, because I doubt the public prosecution will want to look at this without a strong case.
This will cost money.
We are ready to cover the financial part.
But we are not in Germany, so is there anyone on this forum, who's pissed off like everyone else, is based in Germany, and want to help getting this started?

[mycommerce-action]

If we are to have any chance of moving forward with legal proceedings, someone will need to create a page for us all to register. Once we have formed a proper group gauging interest and scale, we can look into the next steps. If we get enough people together and the total amount owed to us is large enough, we should be able to get proper interest from law firms in the US and Germany to look into our case.

Our company is owed around €50K. We are lucky that MyCommerce was not our primary sales channel, so this is a relatively small proportion of our overall sales over the period this happened. However, we still want our money, even more so as this smells strongly of a planned bankruptcy while pretending everything was ok.

I suspect there is a possibility that if work is done to spread the word by everyone, in forums, on LinkedIn, etc, a substantial number of signups could be achieved, and the total amount owed could run well into 8 figures, which should be sufficient to start getting proper interest from law firms.

If a page was created to sign up with name, email, company name, country and amount owed, would people here sign up to it?

Btw, I am surprised that no major financial news outlets appear to have anything at all on this story, e.g. Financial Times. Something needs to be done here too.

[sslsound]

Seeing a lot of activity on LinkedIn about the DR news.

Cleverbridge's CEO (who we ended up going with) posted a tribute of sorts. Looks like the news is starting to spread.