291: Mark Zuckerberg Signed This Contract

In this final episode of Let’s Go To Court, Kristin takes us full circle — with a con man. In his hometown of Wellsville, New York, Paul Ceglia was known for his dishonesty. He always had a scheme going. He often got caught. In fact, he got caught in 2009 running a fraudulent business. But our pal Paul claims that it was in that dark moment, with the government coming after him, he discovered something incredible. While going through his old files, he found a contract that had been signed by an 18-year-old Mark Zuckerberg. According to that contract, Paul was the rightful owner to 84% of Facebook.  And now for a note about our process. For this episode, Kristin read a bunch of articles, then spat them back out in her very limited vocabulary. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the real experts who covered these cases. In this episode, Kristin pulled from: “Facebook Face-off” episode of American Greed “Facebook fraud suspect on the lam; family, dog also missing,” Associated Press “Facebook friend or foe?” by Tim Graham for The Buffalo News “Fugitive Ceglia to be returned to U.S. to face charges of attempting to defraud Facebook,” by Phil Fairbanks for The Buffalo News “Ceglia has bad day in Facebook lawsuit,” by Dan Herbeck for The Buffalo News “Paul Ceglia: The man who owns 84% of Facebook?” by Van Voris for Bloomberg Businessweek “The buy who says he owns 50% of Facebook just filed a boatload of new evidence – and it’s breathtaking,” by Henry Blodget for Business Insider “Facebook’s suit against lawyers for Ceglia thrown out on appeal,” by Bob Van Voris for Bloomberg News  “Where in the world is Paul Ceglia? Possibly Ireland,” by Phil Fairbanks for The Buffalo News  YOU’RE STILL READING? My, my, my, you skeezy scunch! You must be hungry for more! We’d offer you some sausage brunch, but that gets messy. So how about you head over to our Patreon instead? (patreon.com/lgtcpodcast). At the $5 level, you’ll get 55+ full length bonus episodes, plus access to our 90’s style chat room!