Sonic sued for fraud (Update Jan 11)

On January 11 2016 09:50 RCCar wrote:
Update on sonic: http://gall.dcinside.com/starcraft_new/4070963
Fraud confirmed.
Sonic currently on the lam
Sbenu currently the hot keyword of korean portal sites

On January 11 2016 12:09 jinyung2 wrote:

very rough summaries/translations of the dcinside link. its a summary some guy did of the tv segment that came out about sbenu

1. starts with one factory executive in the nude (t/n: on article I read about this guy, he basically went to sbenu hq took off his clothes and was yelling "give me my money!")
money he is owed 2,800,000,000 Won ($2,318,456 USD)

2. this factory and many others related businesses in busan are all in danger of bankruptcy.

3. the guy who was heard in phone recordings (found here: http://blog.naver.com/sbenu2016) comes out (he's a sbenu investor/branch owner) :
- after the overstock/clearance stores showed up he was selling like 0~3 shoes a day.
- the branch stores sell shoes at 790,000 Won but clearance stores sell same shoe for 390,000 Won. customer come get mad come yell at him and demand refund
- some dude who bought sbenu shoes at regular price gets mad saying he paid so much money for shitty shoes

4. sonic comes out:
- comes out with the mosaic voice change identity hiding state you see most criminals show up on tv
- says same thing he said in wikitree interview "clerance store merchandise is not from us, that's all 하이키/highkey(?) (management agency) doing"
- mbc checks in with clearance store and they tell them "we got these shoes from sbenu"
- next day they contact sonic again and he says "i didnt know so i said i dont know!"

5. reason why branch stores cant close business
- this detail wasnt included in the 부산공장 (t/n: this guy is highkey ceo's son from what i know) online leaks (t/n: there were a ton regarding phone calls, pictures, legal documents suing sonic, log of all the different cars leased with sbenu money etc..)
- the stock left in branch stores have been seized
- branch owners cant even sell the stuff they have so they cant close down the business
- money invested to open branch minimum 30,000,000 Won to sometimes 200,000,000 Won. also when branch sells one 990,000 Won shoe, sbenu gets 540,000 Won
- but they are selling the same shoe at clearance for 490,000 Won

6. sbenu management director comes out:
- says same stuff sonic been saying blaming highkey saying they seized the funds
- but does say that the cause of all this is crappy management from parties involved with sbenu
- even this sbenu director is saying all the money they wasted on marketting kinda backfired on them
- summarizer points out that this director says "this company" instead of "our company" so he seems like a third party (t/n: the 부산공장 guy who was posting details online said there were a bunch of new people sonic brought in to try and clean up the mess and cover tracks and stuff)
- says sonic sold all his supercars

in between you see one of his fancy super cars (부산공장 added this picture in this post http://gall.dcinside.com/board/view/?id=starcraft_new&no=4071302&page=1&exception_mode=recommend showing 14 different cars leased using sbenu money but a lot of them were under a third party company name) and articles saying how well his business is doing, and how much profit he plans to make in 2015

7. lies that are snowballing out of control
- since october sonics been saying he brought in some big company rep who would invest in sbenu so the money is coming
- turns out this was a lie
- mbc contacted this big company, says they dont have that guy employed and there was no discussion regarding investment
- the management director says they were tricked by this big company rep for 3 months
- dude looked real mad, seems like a victim

8. conclusion and next step(?) (t/n: i think this last part is a lot of personal opinion from the guy who wrote this summary)
- even in this situation, factory and branch owners dont want the brand to fail
- of course, if the brand fails and dies out then all these ppl lose their jobs
- but its progressed too far, past the point of return
- personally i think they should reveal all the evidence lower the cost of merchandise, everyone buy a pair or two out of pity or government or big business intervenes and we send the shoe abroad
- of course the person responsible for this mess should be punished accordingly and spend the rest of his life repaying his debts. (t/n: some last end bits kinda poking fun at the situation of sonic collecting pity balloons of afreeca has his loan shark count the money)

im sure theres ppl who are better at korean that can point out any mistakes i made in translation. of course this is a summary some other guy wrote but i read a lot of the indvidual stuff thats been surfacing the past couple weeks and this seems to line up a lot with what I know

edit: i dunno why but when ever scandulous shit happens its just so entertaining :S

:D

On January 11 2016 13:58 jinyung2 wrote:

from my understanding its like this

1. sonic spends a fortune on advertisement and marketing, ppl see IU AOA and ppl in drama wearing sbenu shoes and they start to sponsor many different esports stuff (sc2 lol bw etc) it seems really successful and gains rep

2. sbenu goes to factory and uses their rep as some kind of giant super growing company and asks to began shoe production and signs contracts saying funds will be delivered in due time. the highkey ceo's son made public online a bunch of different written contracts sonic stamped saying this will be promised that will be promised etc. but sbenu continues to lag it and blames highkey the management agency saying they have the money. factory has no choice but to sell shoes they have stocked up for cheap. sbenu comes in and buys this posing as a third party for very cheap.

3. investors are like "wow we totally want a piece of this action" so they invest heavily, 100+ stores nation wide, minimum ~30k$ investment up to like ~200k$

4. sbenu supplies (probably also runs) clearance overstock store with shoes they scammed from factory as third party and sells the same shoes they sell at branch stores for 40~60% discounted prices. sbenu for a while stated they did not give these stores they shoes but this was found out to be a lie in the phone recordings 부산공장 posted online. of course what happens is branch stores get fuckedddd people like intotherainbow was extremely mad at sonic cus he was one of the investors and he put in all of his own savings, borrowed money from his family and from his sister to invest in a sbenu branch store and it went out of business VERY fast. 부산공장 mentioned there were some who even took their own lives and a ton of other victims who's lives are being destroyed by this scam

5. now according to very recent stuff that 부산공장 posted on dc, apparently the money sbenu makes from these they launder through some kind of unnamed entertainment agency.


also I read that everything sbenu hasnt been able to get trademark rights since june 2014, because

A)
their logo is like 90% copied from something else

B) theres a shoe brand called SOBENU

and they were basically like "yo your brand name is too similar to ours" and did some legal stuff to which sbenu gave no response