Dealing with a Rogue Ex-Employee: How to Manage Post-Termination Sabotage

How do you handle a rogue ex-employee who, more than a year after being fired, starts to take actions designed to embarrass and cause legal trouble for the manager who let him go.

He's an ex-employee, a dual national no longer living in the U.S. but in his "other" country. I don't think having him employed by a competitor will do any good.

OK, here is the sort of thing he is doing. He uses his background with the company to do such things as have software audits filed against us. He tells the auditors, Software Publishers Alliance, that the manager is letting people use unlicensed software. He tells them which users have it. The manager knows nothing about this, but the ex-employee was in a position to know which computer users might have installed stuff they shouldn't. So the auditors know just which computers and just which users to visit. We suspect he may have planted the software on the computers so that he could then tell the auditors where to look should he ever need to; we can't prove that, however.

The manager had used some images from movies in some internal documents. The next thing he knows, the CEO of the company gets a letter from the studio to stop using these under threat of a lawsuit. The studio has copies of the internal documents as proof. The only way they could have gotten them, we figure, is from this fellow.

He gets flowers with a very suggestive note on them delivered to his home when only his wife is there to accept delivery.

This is the kind of thing that is happening every few months. The police have told us that there is nothing they can do as nothing he has done is technically illegal. He lives overseas now, so the local police are not much interested anyway.

Well, as long as he is trying to help others catch something that is not appropriate in your company, you can't do anything. The law will encourage these kinds of people as whistleblowers.

Two options you have are:

- Ask any of his ex-colleagues/peers to talk to him and encourage him to settle any differences he may have against your company and resolve them within a certain timeframe. If this happens, send a goodwill email to him and keep him in good books. Select someone neutral to talk to him and persuade him not to work against your company. He may also have good support internally; hence, have good updates about internal stuff. So, be careful.

- Find out which city/company he is working in and warn him that your company will start giving negative background verification feedback about him, which may potentially create trouble for him in getting future requirements. You can also warn him about updating his actions to his current employer and tell them that they may also get into the same scenario in the future. This should reduce his interest in settling scores with your company. If not, then there is no option for you.

We have thought about giving negative feedback on him if anyone ever asked us about him. No one ever has. We found his resume online and noted that he doesn't even list working for us on it. It is like we never existed in his work history.

You have a psycho on board. Get a private detective to investigate and talk some sense into him. There may be a good chance that your company must have rubbed him the wrong way, and he is just doing it for revenge. He will stop when he feels adequately mentally compensated.

There is very little one can suggest to you in this case.

If you are really involved in software piracy and plagiarism, then you have given a good reason to trouble yourself, and you should not blame someone else for the same.

You can get rid of this problem by conducting a thorough audit of your hardware and software and by removing all unlicensed software.

Get a neutral person to talk to him and resolve all pending issues with him once and for all to remove his negative motivation against your company.

You can inform or caution his current employer about this individual and his behavior.

Thanks & Regards

OK, here is the sort of thing he is doing. He uses his background with the company to do things such as have software audits filed against us. He tells the auditors, Software Publishers Alliance, that the manager is letting people use unlicensed software. He tells them which users have it. The manager knows nothing about this, but the ex-employee was in a position to know which computer users might have installed unauthorized software. So the auditors know just which computers and which users to visit. We suspect he may have planted the software on the computers so that he could then tell the auditors where to look should he ever need to; we can't prove that, however.

The manager had used some images from movies in some internal documents. The next thing he knows, the CEO of the company gets a letter from the studio to stop using these under threat of a lawsuit. The studio has copies of the internal documents as proof. The only way they could have gotten them, we figure, is from this individual.

He gets flowers with a very suggestive note on them delivered to his home when only his wife is there to accept delivery.

This is the kind of thing that is happening every few months. The police have told us that there is nothing they can do as nothing he has done is technically illegal. He lives overseas now, so the local police are not much interested anyway.

Like Mashok and Vkokamthankar have mentioned already, from the information you have provided, it can be inferred that the law is on his side. Trying to threaten him or giving negative feedback against him deliberately with a vile intent to compromise his career will further damage your own position.

Do not approach law enforcement as you are digging your own ditch by doing so. And yeah, clean up your acts.

Best solution would be to dismiss the manager for violating corporate policies. That will settle everything.

One thing that is troubling to us is that he seems to wait for long intervals between actions. For example, we fired him well over a year ago. Nothing happens for over a year, and then bang! Out of the blue, a couple of events aimed at the manager. Then he goes "dark" as it were for many months, then something else. On a couple of occasions, it has been that the things he brings up happened after he left. For example, internal licensing reviews become known to the local newspaper while they are still underway. This never happened in the past.

We have no idea who he is working for; we are not sure even which nation he is in currently. He holds both a U.S. and an Italian passport and citizenship. His resume is, to say the least, very vague. As I said, he wrote us out of it. He maintained a consultancy business the whole time he worked for us, as we discovered.

We are clean on the software issue now, or so I have been told. We settled the matter with the studio. But the latest has been the flowers delivered to the manager's home and the worry as to what new thing he may be cooking up from afar. Hiring a private detective might work, but we don't know for sure where in Europe or the U.S. he is, and that could get kind of expensive.

The poor manager is really under the gun on this. The CIO wants to know why all these events center around this manager and has said that he is not going to let one manager and his troubles with an ex-employee derail the whole company. The manager is feeling the heat big time and asked that I try to give him a plan for dealing with it, which the CEO has demanded.

Hi all,

I think talking is a better way before taking action. You are wrong; you might have done wrong to X-employee. Now you are getting back what you have done! It is a circle. Don't try to push things further; it will cause more losses but nothing else. Concentrate on your business goals and settle down your scores with him by negotiating (money, good ref, bad report to current/future employers, etc.).

Believe what you will do today; the company will follow the same in case of you also in the future! So be careful whatever you do!

Manish Gupta
Admin & HR Manager

Hello there,

Every organization has some black sheep as well as black holes. Fortunately for you, the black sheep is out of the organization. So his information will be static, i.e., up to the last day of his working in your organization and not updated, unless of course, he has a planted mole even today. The best thing to do, as a few other members have suggested above, is to do an IT audit of your current infrastructure and set things right. Once that is done, you can challenge and handle any subsequent outside audits with due legal recourse of defamation, etc. I would not suggest employing a detective agency or approaching any law enforcement agency until you have concrete documentary proof of his misdeeds. All the best.

With limited understanding in this field, I can suggest the following:

1. Put your house in order - that's the first thing that you need to do as HR:
- Identify and address issues that are wrong, illegal, or unethical and eliminate them.
- Determine the reasons behind dissent among employees and work on resolving them with a positive attitude.
- Lack of internal communication or an employee engagement program may be evident - consider looking into this.

2. Once you have addressed internal issues, assign someone from your team to establish a discussion channel, even if it is formal. This is crucial for identifying and understanding the root cause.

3. You can choose to reach out to his current employer if he did not disclose his employment with your company, indicating that he falsified his CV, which is unacceptable and could lead to dismissal. However, this should be considered as a last resort.

I hope this helps.

I would like to add something to this as I have gone through a similar situation where one of my ex-employees started spreading negative information about our company in the market. Some of it was true, but instead of contacting him to stop it, I focused on the Circle of Influence rather than the Circle of Concern. This involved trying to convince and compromise with him, considering that dealing with him falls under the Circle of Concern because we cannot change the paradigm of someone who is entirely negative towards the company.

However, I also took action to change the company's policies simultaneously. I worked on improving the overall reputation of our company so that the individual had no valid points to misguide others in the market. After a few months, he completely stopped the negative actions. It's worth noting that he is now a very good person to me due to his transformed personality. Therefore, my suggestion to you is to focus on your own Circle of Influence, where you can bring about change, modification, and improvement.

Anyway, thank you, and I hope my sharing will be somewhat helpful.

So, you cannot even find out his current employer and his current employer also doesn't know you. He has clearly outsmarted you guys. So, like Mr. Ramex mentioned, work on your circle of influence. Relieving the manager is the only suggestion I can think of which will settle everything for everyone once and for all.

To me, he looks like a nice guy. Being a system administrator, he would have unprecedented access to a lot of sensitive information. But it looks like he is not taking any illegal path to get back at the manager. If he were really a rogue/psycho/black sheep, he would have caused a lot more damage. The fact that he is using only legal means, and the fact that huge organizations have acted upon with the help of his information clearly indicates that he is a nice guy.

There are incompetent people who are always afraid of intelligent guys. It is their insecurity that causes them to use such language as this -

Dear gkearney,

If he has not mentioned your company's information in his work history, then you have a very good chance to prove that his intention of avoiding that info is not appropriate. You should call his current company's HR and inform them about the situation. Let them know that he is interfering in your company's affairs, and if there is a lawsuit tomorrow, you will make that company a part of it as well. I am not sure how it works in your country, but in India, IT companies are very particular about such matters, and they take immediate action.

I still feel that talking to him is a good option rather than taking legal action. My comments are based on the context of India. If that ex-employee is in India, then I am sure someone in this forum can always help me, including myself.

Ashok

We would contact his current employer if we knew who his current employer is. But we do not know that information; we don't even know what county he is living in.

His resume lists him currently as an independent consultant. It also lists him as an independent consultant for the time he was with us. Technically, this is true as he maintained his consulting business while he was also employed with us. We have never been contacted by anyone about him to confirm that he worked for us.

Given that we do not know who he might be working for or where in Europe or the U.S. (he's a dual U.S. and Italian citizen), it seems unlikely that we will ever be able to contact his employer.

I'm not sure what kind of suit we could bring against him, and even if we did, how would we serve him the papers? Tracking him down could cost a great deal of money and time, and we have already spent more on this than we should have.

More flowers with very explicit notes in female handwriting have turned up, this time at work and always when the manager is out. They have to be left at the reception desk where others can see them and the note. They arrive at random intervals, always following a weekend. It's like he can read our manager's mind.

One of the flower shops told us that a woman came in and paid with cash; they have never seen her before, and she has never returned. The manager is a very conservative type, and this is driving him and his wife crazy.

Hi,

A method you can try is to ask your representatives to meet the ex-employee and try to find out the cause of his disgruntlement and the method of clearing any issue with him. Record the whole conversation (audio & video) so that you could use the same for getting any evidence that he has done all those things which your company is charged with. With this, you could try and seek the assistance of the police for conducting an official 'sting operation' and catch the culprit red-handed.

If such a thing is not possible, then you will realize that you are cornered and have to take remedial measures like an out-of-court settlement or (buy him out), etc., to save your company from further attacks - if possible.

Regards

Dear gkearney,

Although I empathize with your problem, I cannot help being amazed at the creativity and ingenuity of your ex-employee. At times, a whistle-blower and at times acting in a strange non-violent way of protests. May I know why he was fired? If the infraction was not serious, why do you not consider re-hiring him? With his talents put to good use in marketing, new product development, consumer research, etc., he can surely be a great asset to your company. All that is needed is to make him an "engaged employee," and that's where good Human Resource Management comes in.

Warm regards.

lol... What a pathetic and sleazy suggestion. The world would be a much better place without people lacking self-respect to commit legal offenses and stoop low enough to try and trap the person standing up (and that too in a legal manner) for morals... using sleazy, creepy petty tactics like hidden cameras. The world would be a much better place if more people follow the whistleblower's ideals and methods.