On 15th February 2019, Jerome Cle managed to change the company name from Hotelquickly App to Siam Tech Development in Thailand and registered a new company under Rising Sun Travel Inc. in Delaware, USA.
As of today, the 10th May 2019, the two companies have ceased their activities with the following consequences:
Approx. 25K worldwide travellers had their prepaid booking cancelled most of them over Christmas, discovering the situation on arrival at the hotel front desk.
This was made without other notification than a single email and with no other possibility of being reimbursed that claiming funds to their banks. With a shocking and indecent irony, these unfortunate people have been proposed to be compensated with vouchers issued by Clé!
Receivables for around 20 M USD will never get paid to suppliers
And finally, all the employees of Hotel Quickly App (more than 60) are let with unpaid salaries, all of them rudely fired without any notice, sometimes blackmailed, threatened or totally unfairly accused of invented harms.
The scam was completely executed by the chairman himself, namely Jérome Clé, a French businessman who has organized the fraudulent operations with the complicity of its financial partner PrismPay a US based company specialized in card payment over internet (run by US citizen and Clé’s friend named Doug Merryman).
Clé and Merryman together have been able to rip off approximately 15M USD from company account.
Once enough money has been diverted and secured by the crooks, Clé has switched the internet gateways, let some time passed then exaggerated by a factor 20 the technical problems common in this online travel business and blamed with an unbelievable bad faith the service quality of the infrastructure of its main supplier (a leader in B2B hotel rooms reselling). He then simply stopped paying them to create a clash. Bookings were then shortly cancelled by the supplier on behalf of HotelQuickly and the portal halted. End of January, once the wave of complaints has passed, Clé has finally decided to close both companies.
He has also indeed stopped paying wages to all employees, ensuring that, let with no resources they could only shut up and leave Thailand (many of them being foreigners). Clean up by the void and cash secured in the bank being its strategy.
Clé, by creating tricky firewalls between people and companies has smartly managed to hide the situation to everybody including its own staff whom realized too late having been involved against his will into this massive scam. This is an infamy. Not only Clé theft their money but also spoiled their reputation in both industry and Thailand market place.
This letter intends to:
Warn all creditors of the two companies that they have absolutely no chances to recover any funds,
Warn all shareholders and partners of Clé in his other businesses (Rising Sun Travel, Rising Sun VC, Rising Sun Merchant Services) of what is done with their money.
Hit enough Clé’s reputation to ensure he will not be able to set up any new businesses in Thailand, APAC and even anywhere else.
