5 Big Companies Who Went Insane Trying To Get Ahead

After hiring a chemist to produce a variety of yeast that would cause nausea and violent diarrhea, Hancocks bribed a factory employee to dump eight bottles of the stuff into Bulmer's production line. If the plan had succeeded, it would have forced an expensive recall -- and also, you know, a bunch of people would have become seriously ill. Fortunately, the Bulmer employee had a change of heart and called the police. Hancocks was found guilty in 2003 and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He is presumably very sick of people asking him how he liked them apples.

Things started to unravel when Chronicle reporter Chris Quintana reached out to Cloud and became suspicious about his evasive responses to personal questions, as well as his insistence that he could only be interviewed via email. Quintana did some digging and discovered some strange similarities between Cloud's website and LendEDU's own site, including an "odd mixture of juvenile and mean-spirited humor" like headlines that read "43 percent of students said they would hook up with Caitlyn Jenner to erase their debt," or "27 percent of students would contract the Zika virus to live debt-free." When pressed, LendEDU admitted that they had made Cloud up. There's a lesson here, kids ...

But you'll have to pay us 17 grand a year to learn it.

That must be why.

This all led to an amazing lawsuit wherein Air Canada and WestJet both accused each other of corporate espionage. Neither company denied the allegations, but insisted that they hadn't broken the law. Air Canada said Hill's garbage was over his property line and therefore fair game, while WestJet said the information they got through the website was useless and therefore Air Canada had suffered no damage.

The two sides settled in 2006, with WestJet agreeing to pay a small sum ($15 million) in compensation, probably because they realized "We logged in 243,630 times for something meaningless" wasn't going to fly. It also didn't help that Hill used to send an Air Canada executive taunting emails like, "I'd be willing to bet my next profit-share cheque that YWG-YXU has the lowest load factor of any domestic route operated by AC today." That sounds like gibberish, but take our word that it's a freaking devastating burn in the airline management community.

A journalist named Jan Pottker was working on an unflattering book about the Feld family, so Ringling bugged her house and phones, monitored her friends, and tailed her in an attempt to dig up dirt. When that didn't work, they set up a fake literary agency and commissioned her to write a book on the Mars family -- all while discouraging her from pursuing the circus story. When the Mars book was published, Ringling deliberately engineered a copyright dispute with a photographer to get it pulled off the shelves. They then delayed her next book for years. Pottker had no idea why things kept going wrong for her until the story finally broke and she realized her colleague of eight years was a secret circus spy. Don't you hate it when that happens?

Ringling also sent a pair of spies to infiltrate the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS). The duo rose to a high rank in the organization, all while reporting everything back to the circus. They bugged other PAWS officials, and even broke into their houses to photograph them. Other spies joined PETA, where they tried to incite illegal acts, presumably before learning that PETA requires little incitement. The spy unit also bugged and harassed employees who had filed for workman's comp, and covered up a TB outbreak among Ringling's elephants.

It only fell apart when a circus executive decided to bug his girlfriend. One day, he ordered his assistant to collect all the illegal tapes, as well as to pick up a jeep from the girlfriend's house. The assistant became confused, and delivered the tapes to the girlfriend (and then collected all the jeeps?). The woman called the police, and that's what led to the investigation that revealed the spycraft. Ringling Bros. settled all cases out of court before going out of business in 2017. The PAWS settlement involved handing over several elephants, just to bring everything full circle.

You can do better than those apple-poisoners -- brew your own cider.

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