Fraud suits jam Long Island copier firm [Long Island Business News (NY)]
(Long Island Business News (NY) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Another Long Island office machine company is being sued for ripping off customers.
Several former clients of Bohemia-based Long Island Business Solutions have gone to court charging the company and its owner Andrew Fenton with forging signatures, altering the terms of leasing contracts, inflating the value of equipment and not buying out leases, leaving customers owing millions to finance companies.
Three former Long Island Business Solutions employees told LIBN that Fenton would regularly cut out signatures from old documents and paste them onto new leases for machines that customers never ordered. They said the company would remove old equipment from customers but Fenton wouldn't send a buyout check to pay off finance firms for the old machines, many of which were tossed in the trash. That left customers owing payments on new copiers, as well as some that had already been scrapped.
Fenton blamed former salesmen for the customer disputes and said the rest is "hearsay." "There were a lot of allegations made and none were true," Fenton said.
Garden City-based law firm Berkman Henoch Peterson & Peddy sued Fenton and his company last year to recover more than $300,000 owed to three different finance companies for older leases that were supposed to have been bought out. Partner Gil Henoch said his firm is still in litigation with Fenton and Long Island Business Solutions.
"We really got victimized by them," Henoch said.
Rev. John Horatio, former pastor at the Lucien Memorial United Methodist Church in Kings Park, said Fenton's firm faked his signature on a lease financed by Key Bank for new Toshiba copiers two years ago. After examining the lease he had signed a few years earlier, the retired pastor said it was obvious the new contract sported a slightly enlarged, but otherwise exact copy of the old signature.
Horatio called the Suffolk County Police Department about the fraud. He said the police contacted Fenton and advised him to release the church from the fraudulent finance contract. A month later, Key Bank relented and the church was off the hook.
Others haven't been as fortunate. Jaime Arnedo, of AR Tech International in Setauket, said his company had to swallow $12,000 for a lease not paid off by Fenton. AR Tech has recently taken Long Island Business Solutions to court over the disputed contract.
"He committed fraud," Arnedo said. "It's outrageous." Fenton and Long Island Business Solutions have also been sued by the Holy Reedemer Church in Brooklyn, St. Matthew's Roman Catholic Church in Dix Hills, Hirari Engineering and Land Surveying in Jericho, Custom Staffing in Manhattan and several more.
Jack Hundley, from the Knox School in St. James, said the school hasn't yet sued Fenton and Long Island Business Solutions, but he said officials are exploring that avenue. The school is now in the hole for more than $60,000 in office equipment leases and Hundley said the signature of headmaster George Allison on at least one lease was phony.
Hundley tried to contact Fenton to no avail.
"He just disappeared," Hundley said. "Long Island Business Solutions just dropped off the face of the earth." That may be what Fenton wants his long trail of disgruntled former customers to believe, but LIBN has learned that Fenton is still in the copier business with a new name at the very same address. Despite his assertion that he's no longer in the business and that Long Island Business Solutions is a "past part of my life," Fenton is listed as CEO of Newport Business Solutions on company correspondence and press releases. Sources said he runs the office machine supplier at 61 Keyland Court and even makes sales calls to customers.
Ed Williams, owner of Eastern Business Systems in Bohemia, has been in the office equipment industry for 57 years and he's seen Fenton coming in and out of Newport often. He added that Fenton has also been visiting some of his old customers.
"He is the type of business that every honest dealer despises because he makes us all seem corrupt," Williams said. "And that's far from the case." Last month, LIBN reported that Melville-based Carr Business Systems had been sued by some of its customers for similar fraudulent leasing practices. Last week, two Carr executives, President Mitch Cohen and Chief Financial Officer Denise Materazzo, resigned and Carr's parent Xerox hired attorneys from Nixon Peabody to look into the company's leasing operations and accounting procedures, according to sources associated with the firm
Original Post