If you think it's bad now, the early days of the web were absolutely filled with scumbag grifters who made small fortunes hiring contractors and then refusing to pay.

Many of them disappeared in the y2k dot com bust, but then seem to have reappeared in SF after 2008.

In the late 1990's, my second ever Flash app development client stiffed me on a $10k invoice.

He finally figured out 6 months later that he didn't have the source material to make changes and paid the full invoice in order to get it.

So I took precautions with the next client. It was a small agency that was serving a much larger business.

We were on 30 days net payment terms and I submitted the invoice when the project was done.

They didn't pay and within a couple weeks of gentle reminders, they stopped responding.

I smiled.

Exactly 30 days from the due date, I got a panicked call shrieking about their largest client website being down and did I have anything to do with it?!

I asked them what the hell they were talking about, they don't own a website. They never paid for any websites. I happen to own a website and I would be happy to give them access to it if they want to submit a payment.

They started to threaten legal nonsense, and how they had a "no time bombs clause in the contract."

I laughed because my contract had no such clause. If they signed such a contract with the client, that's not my problem.

I told them I wouldn't release the source files until the check cleared my bank, which could be weeks. A cashier's check arrived that morning and their source files were delivered.

By the end of it, the folks at the agency thanked me because that client wasn't planning to pay them and they hired me for other work (which, they had to prepay for).

Of course I don't know about the OP, but I'd bet the company was trying to stiff that contractor on their last check.

Mostly non-malicious example... My employer asked me to write a UI to solve a problem for a handful of people until a proper (giant ever-delayed) migration was finished. Over a couple of weeks I made it work despite not having dealt with MVVM/XAML/Whatever before and I was pretty pleased with the outcome. But it was a hacked together thing! I'm not a real dev and given that I got a promise it wouldn't get distributed.

So, you know, in the program.cs startup I checked the username vs a hardcoded list of people in the relevant teams, and if it wasn't crashed out with an error and a support email address.

About 18 months after I had moved on, I got an email with a screenshot of that error message. it would appear the Milan (something like that) office had got their hands on a copy but it just wouldn't work for them...

Trivial to undo of course, but I did enjoy the throwback!

That's a dangerous fix. What if someone tries to run your new version in the past?