A Company I Was Negotiating With Intentionally Targeted And Disabled My Specific Device With A Software Update So That They Could Buy It Back From Me Cheaper.

I was at a store that sells items that were lost in shipping, but found after insurance had already paid out for them. The insurance companies sell the stuff off to this store for pennies on the dollar. I found a pelican case there in its box for a really good price. When I got it home I found some very expensive scientific equipment that had been packed inside. I didn’t know what to do with it so It sat there for months.

Not long ago I reached out on a scientific forum asking for advice on what to do with it. I received a lot of interest in it and many parties interested in buying it. One of them was the company that manufactured it. They expressed concern about the device getting into the hands of their competitors. I told them, while I need to sell it to the highest bidder, I would give them first option to buy it.

The manufacturer made a low ball offer. Other parties made me offers including a party that I thought likely to be the competition. I countered the offer to the manufacturer, at a rate more than double their initial offer. I let them know about the potential competition.

They said that they could bring the price higher if I could run some tests to verify that it booted up and that the optics worked. So I followed their directions and installed the software. I booted up the device and connected it to the software. Then the device stopped working. I thought it might have been a an issue with the crappy $1 power supply that they included with this $30k (retail) device. I told them about the problem.

They then made me an offer below their initial low ball offer. And tried to convince me the electrical was damaged in the time it was lost in shipping.

I decided to try to figure out what was wrong so that I could fix it. In the process I opened their software in a program that took it back from being in assembly language to be human readable code.

I found very clear evidence that the specific serial number of my system was targeted by the code to have the firmware overwritten by a different, corrupted firmware. They updated their software to this version on the day they asked me to run the tests.

In the current state the device is inoperable. It might be possible to reinstall the firmware on the device, but it’s not guaranteed to work. And the device is essentially blacklisted from their software. If it is connected it will have the firmware overwritten again.

I confronted them about it and they responded that they would offer me the same as their first low offer, contingent on them being able to inspect it in their lab first. They also took the opportunity to remind me that I agreed to the software license by using the software.(Apache 2.0.)

What they did was fraud right? I can’t trust them to be honest with the inspection in their lab. And their offer really doesn’t make me whole. I now can’t really sell it to anyone else.

What are my options? Any advice on how to proceed?