In November of 2008 I was working for a company by the name of Smartlink WorldWide. It was a telemarketing phone room in Las Vegas that would solicit the sale of various types of phone services to business owners across the U.S. I was the second commander in charge. During that month after running perfectly for 7 months prior, we mysteriously started having problems with our computer network that ran dialing system for the agents to make calls. The company decided to hire an IT contractor to fix the problem, and this is how I first came face to face with Al Melquist.
In January of 2009 Smartlink started to go downhill, so we decided that it would be a good idea to try and start our own company using the contacts that we made during our time of employment. The original plan was for Al and myself, and a co-worker of mine to use our resources together and form a new company . Al convinced me to leave my co-worker out and get an investor to split the profits 2 ways. He claimed that this type of business should only be run with 2 people (putting me in a position to be an easy target).
By February Al started by telling me that a man by the name of “Butch” who worked for ABC as a producer of TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel and Dancing with the Stars was going to be one of the initial investors. Being as trusting as I am, at this time I believed it would be a good idea to start looking for equipment and new employees to work for the business. It wasn’t long before I’d done my part, and it was time to take the next step. Al informed me that “Butch” was busy with shows and would take longer than expected to make an offer. Being that we had come that far I offered to present the investment to my father until we heard back from “Butch”. It was at this time that Al told me he had a reserve of 12k dollars in case we were to run out. It wasn’t long until I had my father’s and my joint credit card in my hands and we were off to the races.
At first things seemed pretty normal. I put up the down payment for the lease, bought the computers and headsets, set up COX communications, and our dialing service and we were off. I was to be the CEO and Al was to be the VP. Our business name was Purple Valley Inc. Al agreed to file the incorporation papers to make everything legit.
We were selling a service for a company by the name of NextGen Communications that offered discounted rates without any physical changes to our customers phone service. Our first week open we were able to sell 68 phone lines at $59 per line giving us a gross income of $4,012. After paying the employees roughly $1,420 we were left with approx $2,592 which we agreed to split for efforts put forth up until that time. Being that I had already used $19k from the credit card for us to begin Al generously handed me $350 towards the company debt and promised me as things got better he would start to make bigger payments.
Al’s main focus during this time was supposed to be building a dialer through an open source software called VICIDIAL. He said he would have it done in a week. Until his project was finished we were using the services of a company by the name of Five9, an internet based dialing system that allowed us to log in remotely and make calls from the comfort of our own office.
Needless to say, it wasn’t until May that the dialer was even ready for testing. At first I didn’t mind paying Five9. I just thought with all the other things that needed to be done maybe Al just needed a little more time. He informed me that he did this, that and the other thing to this software to make it “military grade”, and we would be able to sell this service in “no time”.
To make a long story short, I wasn’t buying his excuses anymore, so I started to do some basic internet searches on him and found thing’s like this post to a VICIDIAL support forum:
From http://www.eflo.net/VICIDIALforum/viewtopic.php?t=7778&sid=6804f43b871033127abebb1f76583e0e
Cottonking2000 (AKA Troy Allen Melquist)
Joined: 06 Mar 2009
Posts: 43
Posted: Thu Apr 23, 2009 2:25 pm Post subject: Dial plan setup
I need a few hints. I am trying to set up this type of feature:
Dial 9 before number = IAX
Dial 8 before number = SIP
My endpoint devices at the VOIP provider are set up fine. We currently test and call on Vicidial now..
In the Dial Plan entry I can handle this type of mod by changing the following:
exten => _71999NXXXXXX,1,AGI(agi://127.0.0.1:4577/call_log)
exten => _7 1999NXXXXXX,2,Dial(${TESTIAXTRUNK}/${EXTEN:2},,tTor)
exten => _7 1999NXXXXXX,3,Hangup
_81999NXXXXXX
_7 to my desired 8 or 9 and match the rest of the set up:
[SIP Voipstreet]
disallow=all
allow=gsm
…. Kinda reverse learning the admin setups…..from the config files…
I came to believe he didn’t even know what he was doing and started to find out that there was more to this story than I originally thought. I know what some of you are thinking: Why didn’t I just end it there? Believe me when I tell you I tried, but this guy was good. Between the promises and personal guarantees and finally getting the dialer working decent enough to make calls with — and not to mention save the company $3,000 a month in service fees to Five9 — I was sold! Little did I know that the amount of time we were about to spend fixing problems with the dialer would far outweigh any amount I would ever have to pay Five9 over the next 4 months. During our relationship with Five9 Al managed to finagle an extra two months out of Five9, dragging them along while giving me little to no information on our current situation with them — except that they were giving us free service for the problems that we were experiencing at the time.
Another long story made short: When the VICIDIAL project was finally operational enough to not need Five9 anymore, it turned out that there was a remaining balance of $2,400 owed to Five9. Of course, Al never informed me of this and the bill was tacked on to my previous investments, now up to $24k. (Remember, this bill was under my father’s credit and my father’s name.)
Rent was due and we had to make a decision. We were at the point of clearing roughly 90-100 lines of activated service per week equaling roughly $5,500. He was able to convince me that we should take care of ourselves first and pay back on the loan when we had more money.
Al started insisting that we “fly under the radar” for a while and not register anything with the state or pay taxes so he could keep off of the charts. (Hey, what happened to his promise to file incorporation papers?)
This became a new sign to me. I became more suspicious and started further investigation. After some research I came to find out about a company owned by Al several years ago in Oregon in the name of RedcellX. At the time he was using the name “Troy Melquist”. As you may already know at RedcellX he managed to hire and use people for their talents and abilities, and then managed to not pay them for their work, leaving the state of Oregon a pretty hefty bill when he skipped town and never showed up for court.
For Purple Valley, Al’s plan going forward was to sign a new lease across the way, giving us a bigger space and 3 months free rent to help balance payments and monies owed. The new lease was signed under the name of “Troy Allen Melquist” for 3 years at $5,000 per month with 3 months free rent. It was during this time that I discovered Al had illegally set up a PayPal acct under his name and home address, but attached to my personal bank account. It was not until I was able to retrieve an email confirmation of this (an email that Al was unable to erase in time) that I was able to confirm this account. At this point I tried to start a police investigation with the bank records and emails that I had received.
As of right now Al is currently trying to convince the current vendors that I work with that he owns Purple Valley and the rights to monies owed to us (approximately $25k). (Bizarrely, he attempts this by sending a copy of his passport and a copy of a photo id which have absolutely no relevance to ownership of anything). At this juncture in time I have been lucky enough to prove him wrong through all of the receipts I have for the business as well as all of the documentation listing me as owner and CEO of Purple Valley leaving Al out in the cold with nothing but empty threats of court cases and fictitious documents that he creates in the comfort of his own home on a word processing program (with misspelled grammar and fill in the blanks). I call these threats “empty” because of Al’s rap sheet. Enough people have claims against him that he is effectively unable to set foot in a courtroom without a chance of being thrown in jail.
In fact, Al is so desperate to try and claim the rights to monies owed to myself and Purple Valley that he has relentlessly called my employees offering them money for the last 5 days straight, asking them to send emails to my broker stating that they worked for him under Purple Valley and that they are not being paid so he can claim the money. Well Al, thanks to you I just had to take another $5k off my credit card to pay my employees again, unlike yourself and your broken promises for the last 4 months that “checks would be coming and everyone would get paid”.
This is Al’s M.O. and for those of you who know his familiar pattern.
I have currently filed police reports on Al for identity theft in hopes that one day someone will put a stop to this monster. He deserves to be behind bars for all of the harm that he has done to myself and my family, all of his past doings and also for his efforts of extortion of monies from myself and my family as well. Al is also known for renting homes and not paying the rent and is currently residing in the southwest Las Vegas where he is once again trying to take advantage of a innocent home owner who is renting him his home.
The moral of my story is “Don’t be a Melquist!”
Anyone who has any information that can help me with my case please come forth you can remain anonymous, I can be contacted at 702-336-2887.
Thanks for taking the time to read my story.
—
Danial Parisi
—
Here are a few facts about Al through the last 4 months of my experience;
- He claimed to work for FBI, but when I called the FBI there was no record of Troy or Al Melquist under his current S.S.
- He claimed to work for Boyd Gaming a Nevada Gaming company as a secret micro chip maker. When I contacted the head of security for Boyd there were no records to be found on Troy or Al Melquist.
- When discussion was brought forth in efforts to collect half of the monies owed for original investment, Al stated he had prostate cancer and threw a temper tantrum in front of all of my employees including crying as a poor attempt for pity.
- When asked for monies owed to help pay employees and bills due, Al stated that money was on the way and he would pay when it arrived.
- Over the last 2 weeks Al has harassed me and all parties involved with my company through relentless emails, fictitious documents and even slander to personal contacts in all of my email accounts through programs he uses to get into my PC from a remote location.
- Al has tried to accuse me of being part of the mafia linked to Salvatore Parisi who was arrested in Italy last year for drug trafficking and is currently trying to create an alias for me in the name of Dan Parisi.
- Al has all of my personal information such as my Social, DOB, Driver License and home address giving him free reign to try and make my life hell.
- Al has set up a PayPal account under his name and home address under my personal bank account using my social security number as well as other personal information that he has obtained during the time of our relationship.