Update: If you wish to know only about Arcade City and none of Christopher David’s history go here.
I’m writing this post in response to a reddit thread performing due diligence regarding the company, Arcade City. Arcade City claims to be a rideshare startup designed to be integrated into the Ethereum blockchain. If you are not familiar with Arcade City, watch the 5 minute pitch they posted here.
This story details my experience working with and attempting to prosecute the CEO of the company, Christopher David. It spans experiences compiled over 5 years. I will detail events with emails, court judgments, police reports, and other evidence. Two other individuals who were also defrauded by Christopher have asked that I not detail their names. Their stories will be referenced, but their identities will be protected.
Christopher David was born Christopher Pille. Even before I met Chris in December of 2011, Chris had already started a habit of starting projects, gathering enthusiastic supporters, stealing from them and ditching the cause. He has quite an online footprint and below is a twitter account from before he changed his name:
He claims he was an anti-war protester and Ron Paul supporter, yet often times is unable to even articulate basic political talking points. Chris has a habit of riding the coattails of other movements in order to extract volunteers for his pet causes. Before moving out to California, Chris was working with the non -profit, Young Americans for Liberty. Proving to be decent at organizing volunteers through online forums, Chris convinced the organization to fly him out to California to start another chapter. When he got to California, he failed to perform for YAL, citing other projects he wanted to pursue. He was then let go of from YAL. Jeff Frazee, then executive director of YAL would go on to say Christopher Pille was plagued with an “ambition that surpassed his abilities”
Chris then changed his name from Chris Pille to Christopher David and formed a company, Victory Online that supposedly operated as a web marketing company. His company was hired by a law firm, which one partner later on became a friend of mine. The partner employed his services for a few months until he realized Chris was an unreliable person to work with. The firm terminated Chris’s contract. With no money left, Chris decided to run for Congress. This was when I met Chris.
When I met Chris through a local Young Republicans club in December of 2011, Chris claimed to be forming a large slate of Liberty minded Republican candidates to run for office in 2012. The partner at the law firm, who also intended to run for Senate was one of those candidates. I, as a believer of the local Republican movement, joined his campaign.
I distinctly remember one campaign meeting in January of 2012. The campaign included the lawyer who previous hired Chris. He and a few other candidates were there discussing the Liberty slate of candidates running for local office positions (mainly Congress and Senate). Chris came into the meeting flustered and disheveled demanding I write him a check for $10,000 or get others to donate up to $10,000. He didn’t explain why, just that he needed the money. I didn’t get him the money, and a few days later, he moved out of room he was renting in Bel Air, CA. That day, the lawyer decided that it would not be wise to have Chris on the slate, and proposed we each run independent campaigns. I should have left the campaign that day, but I didn’t much to my chagrin.
That story is detailed here in this Ripoff Report I wrote in December of 2013.
If you want to get an idea how terrible Chris was as a politician, just check out this Reddit AMA he did about this candidacy in 2012:
He even documented one of his convention trips in a painful and sexist video
I left Chris’ campaign in April of 2012 upon realizing he had stolen upwards of $5000 from me. After Chris stole from me, I chose at first to keep the matter a personal one, believing I could solve it through emails and being cordial. I even gave Chris the time to pay me back. He never did. He would go on to lose the 2012 primary election.
For most of 2013, I didn’t hear from Chris. Many times, he would not email me back. When he would, he would claim to pay me back then wouldn’t. I sent him emails every month detailing the statements as per my original agreement. He’d answer back sporadically with empty promises or not at all. After realizing I was not going to convince him, I sued him in small claims court. I won in March of 2014 in a default judgement.
After publishing the Ripoff Report in December of 2013, I was contacted by a fellow colleague who also worked for Christoper David, lets call her Alice. I met Alice when I worked for Christopher David in 2012. Alice stayed on with his campaign until he lost in the primary in June of 2012. Alice is a respected member in Los Angeles Republican politics. She has worked with past Republican candidates for well over 20 years, and her working reputation developed through her honesty was very important to her. Alice’s attorneys have allowed me to reference her case.
Alice reached out to me to tell me what Christopher David did to her. Alice’s employment contract with David was broken numerous times. He never paid her on time and had managed to convince her to work with him when he tried running for Congress again, this time in the 2014 midterm election. Alice’s story can be backed up with more than two years worth of emails. It would take a lifetime to document all the times she contacted Chris, only to be strung along with promise of payment.
After the 2014 midterm election cycle, Chris had managed to extract months of work out of Alice on promise of payments that were never delivered. Chris defaulted on the contract numerous times, and left her owing more than $8,000 in unpaid billings. By the time Alice had contacted me in 2014, she was broke and couldn’t afford to pay her own rent. I helped her out by loaning her money.
When Chris worked with Alice, he also took advantage of the donors Alice introduced him to. One contact he managed to defraud $10,000 out of to invest in his web marketing company Victory Online (which went nowhere):
Alice’s donor never saw her investment pay off. Victory Online would go on to flop.
After he defrauded that donor, he went on a number of vacations in 2013 with the donor money, even proposing to his girlfriend with what was admitted by Chris to be a “fake $150 ring purchased on Amazon.”
After realizing he couldn’t win the primary in 2014, Chris abandoned his Congressional campaign and decided to start a Bitcoin consulting company Coinvox. He, abruptly stopped working with Alice and immediately began drumming up support for his next big venture, Coinvox. Coinvox was supposed to be a political donation platform that allowed Bitcoin donations to be processed by non profits and campaigns:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42vkKIACoc8
Neither Alice nor I were involved in Coinvox, but I’m willing to let you guess what happened to it…..
If you guessed that it got media coverage in Bitcoin forums, websites, and chat rooms, promised lofty goals and revolutionary payouts, then fizzled and failed miserably while Chris defrauded other associates in the process, you’d be right. In this pitch for Coinvox he claims that :
And of course, any Christopher David ventures does not come complete without a fresh amount of fraud. Chris defrauded another partner for over $10,000 again. His partner in coinvox has asked I protect her identity:
Coinvox of course also went on to failure. Investors in Coinvox never saw any results, only expensive trips taken by Chris to attend Bitcoin conventions in New York, Washington DC, and Hong Kong. Just like his Congressional campaigns, Chris loved to use raised money on vacations and getaways.
His twitter account for Coinvox details the many adventures he went on with investors money. It has been inactive since October of 2014.
With multiple failures under his belt and now numerous individuals asking him for money, Chris leaves California and settles in New Hampshire where he decides to thumb his nose at the local ordinance regarding Uber in Portsmouth, NH:
I am not going to go too much into detail about the Free Uber campaign he decided to start. Personally, I was not involved in it, but you can guessed what happened to it:
In November of 2015, Chris decides to turn on Uber and create Arcade City.
Now he is asking for money. Lots of it. If I have not convinced you enough that Christopher David is a sociopathic fraudster, then I dont know what will. But I will go further.
In the process of creating Arcade City he decided to screw over more people.
I’ve heard from others that Christopher David has taken funds from a “swag sale” and used it to pay for the legal troubles caused by his Free Uber campaign. I cannot confirm this for sure, but all the evidence in Arcade City points to Chris going about his normal routine of fraud all over again. The writing is already on the wall for Arcade City. I predict Chris will drum up online support in forums, articles, and facebook group, then fail to deliver. In the process, his most dedicated supporters will be the ones who are hurt the most. Right now as of this writing, Alice is having a hard time staying financially afloat.
The name of this story is the Dirge of Christopher David because when it comes down to it, it truly is a sad story. I personally dont have a problem with someone failing. I even gave him the benefit of the doubt, and gave him well over a year from April of 2012 before I started pursuing this further. But Chris has shown time and time again he has not learned his lesson. He moves to a different location, changes his appearance, finds some cause to get others excited about, identifies his most loyal supports, then steals from them. He has not only done this once, but multiple times. Chris does not care about any of the movements he starts. Rather, those movements function as a vehicle for Chris’s desire for fame and fortune. In politics, Chris has proven that he doesn’t care about the issues, and only superficially uses them as a heuristic to obtain donations. In business, Chris has proven to be a horrible investment with not one successful venture yet hundreds and thousands of unpaid debts. Chris is only 29 years old as of this writing, and if he is not stopped, more people will have their lives ruined by him. The only place I believe he belongs is in jail.
Please, do your due diligence, don’t become another victim in Christopher David’s destructive quest for fame.
