my 2 cents......where are all the people who gave money to someone here who had a custom viper couch made for Scott's son when he was very ill? a lot of people donated a lot of money in support of this gift to Scott for his son, presumably because they thought a lot of him and his family. he must not have been all that "good"........or he's not all that "bad".
Was the 10K recent, or is this one of the never ending hood stories?
I am one that gave money to the Viper Couch. At that time, no issues had arisen, and he was running a nice side Viper business with his son as the mechanic. He was pleasant to deal with, and when people had problems, he addressed them.
Sadly, things went south. Scott built a big new shop, a series of hurricanes hit keeping him at work for extended periods, his son had severe medical issues (not necessarily in this order). My humble opinion is he got in over his head trying to run a part time business that turned into a full time business while holding another full time job with the fire department. I would guess his son's insurance was through his fire-department job, so leaving the fire department to spent 100% of his time doing Elite was out of the question, but that's just a guess.
Once the domino's started to fall, failure was inevitable. The root of the failure was poor quality by the subs doing work for him. He was not able to address the issues with customers that resulted and the quality of the subs parts. The doggy-do hit the fan, and that was that.
He is still "in business", but he'll never be what he could have been due to the many bridges he burned. If he continues to deliver sub-par parts, and not back them up, he will not be in any level of business.