This isn't grifting, and if they had specified the distributor it would be libel. This is a story about a small business that made a lot of bad decisions and got in way over theirs heads.
That's all well and good, but the spin to try to make themselves look like victims is pretty disingenuous. This sounds like the story you get from a teenager about how it's everyone else's fault after they're caught red handed doing something wrong.
How are they possibly not the victims after the distributor orders a vast quantity of product, goes MIA for months, and then proceeds to go "whoops, just kidding, here's your stale product back"?
They are victims, but also they are in business that should know what they are doing. This stuff isn't exactly uncommon if you do some research. And that is why they should have been entirely sure what they signed up for. They were not forced to enter this contract, but instead choose to.
Yeah. I guess it could be grift if the distributor never really had a realistic buyer for them and they were just taking a high risk with somebody else's capital or it was all in order the get the fees that the article mentioned them trying to charge. The article isn't clear about whether those fees are even in the contract or not, or how they overcame them.
That's all well and good, but the spin to try to make themselves look like victims is pretty disingenuous. This sounds like the story you get from a teenager about how it's everyone else's fault after they're caught red handed doing something wrong.