Board game publishers Petersen Games (Cthulhu Wars, Planet Apocalypse) has filed a lawsuit against German shipping company CCS for fraud and other charges. In a filing in the District Court for Central Utah, Petersen Games have brought a number of complaints against the German company.
Petersen Games has claimed that CCS “A large German shipping conglomerate” has for years been holding a them hostage, double and triple billing for services, sometimes for services not provided, breaching contracts, and holding inventory hostage until ransom payments were received.
Complaints include:
- The total amount CCS owes Petersen Games related by its overbilling alone equals $495,789.
- The value of the inventory owned by Petersen Games currently being held hostage by CCS equals $340,205.58. Petersen Games is also seeking court action against CCS to escape the threats, bullying, extortion and inventory hostage taking that it has been beholden to for the past many years.
- Over the last decade, CCS has become the main shipping partner of Petersen Games by insisting on a greater and greater share of Petersen Games shipping business in order to perform on previously agreed to work. When questioned about erroneous billing practices and numerous shipping mistakes, CCS representatives became angry and deepened their threats.
- Most recently, CCS has threatened to file lawsuits against Petersen Games in Germany, threatened to coerce EU customs agents to refuse Petersen Games products into the common market, threatened to use their influence to have Petersen Games’ VAT tax registration canceled (“which will make business for you impossible”), threatened to open attacks on the reputation of Petersen Games on multiple online channels, and have threatened to sell off “all the remaining [Petersen Games] products we still have in our warehouses” and keep the proceeds for themselves.
The court documents go on to state that Petersen Games worked with Investable, “outside financial experts” to analyze all of their financial and billing details with CCS.
“Investable spent nearly 100 hours studying all invoices sent by CCS and payments made by Petersen Games using two independent methods and data sets. First, Investable analyzed invoices through CCS’s customer portal and discovered 9 types of billing errors, many of which were repeated frequently. One class of error occurred 260 times out of a total of 814 total invoices.
Second, Investable collated all invoices from CCS to Petersen Games into one table, which revealed many instances of invoices logged in incorrect years and many instances of unpaid invoices being reissued without zeroing out the previous invoice being reissued.”
Petersen Games claims that bringing this information to CSS has resulted in the German company responding with hostility, threats, and bullying.
All in all, Petersen Games is suing CCS for charges of Fraud, Unjust Enrichment, Civil RICO, and Conspiracy under 18 U.S.C.
Great article, glad this is out in the open.
Should you include a disclaimer though, to let folks know you’ve worked with Petersen Games before?
I could, but I didn’t because it wasn’t relevant to the article. I haven’t worked at PG in over a year and a half, and everything I wrote in this article was factual (no opinions or editorializing was added), and from publicly available information.
Even a collection of facts can be biased by the decision of which facts are included or left out.
That said, your points are fair, and this is a board game site, not the AP. Also, I’m just now realizing that this article is from June. Sorry for bugging you!