Joshua Paul Lintz was hired to run the company. Instead, a federal RICO complaint alleges, he gutted it — downloading thousands of confidential files, permanently deleting over 130 client projects, and incorporating a competing company that billed $12 million in its first year using the stolen assets. All within sixty days.

The job was Chief Operating Officer of TopDevz, a San Diego software development firm. The salary was $200,000 a year. The access was total: client contracts, contractor databases, financial records, project management systems, internal communications. Everything a COO needs to run a business. Everything, it turns out, that a COO would need to replicate one.

Twenty-two months after the hire, according to the complaint, Lintz flipped. He joined forces with Tyler Brandon Davis, the company’s 49% minority member who the complaint identifies as the enterprise’s principal organizer. And then, over the course of a single week in January 2022, he and his co-defendants allegedly performed what security professionals would recognize as a textbook trusted-insider extraction: take everything valuable, destroy the evidence, and rebuild somewhere else before anyone realizes what happened.

The somewhere else was called TalentCrowd. It was incorporated in Wyoming on February 8, 2022 — thirty-three days after a key arbitration order. It set up shop in Solana Beach, just minutes from TopDevz’s La Jolla headquarters. And within twelve months, it was generating revenue that the complaint traces directly to the stolen database.

The Setup

Joshua Paul Lintz, a resident of San Diego County, joined TopDevz at a moment when the company was at the height of its earning power. The business was generating millions in annual revenue from enterprise clients. Its proprietary contractor database, housed in Zoho Recruit, contained thousands of vetted technology professionals. Its Jira project management system tracked every active engagement. Its financial records documented every client relationship, every billing rate, every receivable.

As COO, Lintz sat at the operational center of all of it. He was the person who knew which contractors were assigned to which projects. He understood the pricing models. He had visibility into the pipeline. He had relationships with the clients. For twenty-two months, he accumulated the kind of institutional knowledge that cannot be replicated from the outside — the sort of deep operational fluency that takes years to develop and is nearly impossible to protect against if the person who holds it decides to use it for something other than its intended purpose.

The complaint paints a picture of a company that had no reason to suspect what was coming. Lintz was performing his duties. The business was functioning. And then, in January 2022, everything changed.

The Turn

The RICO complaint names fifteen defendants and alleges an eight-year criminal enterprise involving more than 750 predicate acts of racketeering. At the top of the alleged conspiracy was Tyler Brandon Davis, a 49% minority member of TopDevz who, the complaint alleges, spent years attempting to seize control of a company he did not have the authority to manage. The legal infrastructure was allegedly provided by attorneys Scott Carpenter of Newport Beach and, later, D. Edward Hays of Beverly Hills.

But the complaint draws a sharp distinction between those who allegedly planned and those who allegedly executed. Davis may have been the strategist. The attorneys may have maneuvered in courtrooms. Lintz, the filing contends, was the operative — the person who turned a conspiracy of paperwork and legal filings into an actual operational theft.

His alleged conversion happened in January 2022, twenty-two months after his hire. The timing matters. Arbitration between TopDevz’s founder, Ashkan Rajaee, and Davis was already active. On January 6, 2022, Interim Order No. 4 was issued in those proceedings. The complaint argues that the conspirators immediately began violating it.

And the person best positioned to carry out that violation was the man who ran the company’s daily operations.

Seven Days of Extraction

What the complaint describes next reads less like a corporate dispute and more like a heist with a countdown clock.

Between January 6 and January 14, 2022, Melissa Garcia, TopDevz’s Manager of Accounts Payable, downloaded 3,784 confidential files from TopDevz email accounts. The downloads were split across two accounts: 1,868 files from the company accounting address and 1,916 from Garcia’s own company email. These were not random documents. They were the complete financial anatomy of a technology staffing company — every invoice, every payment term, every contractor rate, every client billing arrangement, every outstanding receivable.

The instruction to download came from Tyler Brandon Davis. He would later testify about it under oath, and his words appear verbatim in the complaint: “I instructed her to download as much information as humanly possible at that time.”

As much information as humanly possible. Not a targeted retrieval. A total extraction.

Then came the crown jewel. On January 14, 2022, Amanda Frye, TopDevz’s Director of Accounts, downloaded the entire Zoho Recruit database. This was not a spreadsheet. This was the proprietary contractor network that TopDevz had spent years building: thousands of technology professionals, each one sourced, vetted, interviewed, and tracked across multiple engagements. Skills assessments. Rate histories. Performance records. Availability schedules. Contact information. The entire operational engine of the company, pulled in a single download.

Garcia taking the financial records. Frye taking the contractor database. Both in the same eight-day window. The complaint presents this not as coincidence but as coordination — two synchronized extractions, each targeting a different vital organ of the same company.

Scorched Earth

Stealing data is one thing. What the complaint alleges happened next goes further: destroying the evidence that the data ever existed.

According to the filing, Lintz ordered and facilitated the permanent deletion of more than 130 TopDevz client projects from the company’s Jira project management system.

For anyone outside the software industry, the scale of this act requires context. Jira is not a filing cabinet where old paperwork collects dust. It is the live operational nervous system of a development organization. Every task assignment, every sprint cycle, every bug report, every client deliverable, every developer’s billable hour — all of it lives in Jira. Deleting 130 client projects does not simply remove some records. It obliterates the institutional memory of what work was done, for whom, by which developers, under which contracts, generating which revenue.

The complaint argues the timing was deliberate. The deletions occurred in the same January 2022 window as the mass downloads. The pattern, as the filing presents it: extract what you need, then burn what you leave behind. Download the database, the financial records, the contractor network. Then delete the project histories so that no one can prove later exactly what was taken or reconstruct what the company looked like before the extraction.

The complaint characterizes the deletions as obstruction of justice, noting that arbitration proceedings were already active and court orders had been issued. The records being destroyed were precisely the records that would have documented TopDevz’s operational reality — its clients, its projects, its revenue streams — in any legal proceeding that followed.

Thirty-Three Days to TalentCrowd

Exactly thirty-three days after Interim Order No. 4 was issued, on February 8, 2022, Joshua Paul Lintz incorporated TalentCrowd, LLC in Wyoming.

Wyoming was a deliberate choice. The state imposes minimal disclosure requirements, charges no state income tax, and provides strong asset protection. A company incorporated in Wyoming can operate anywhere while revealing almost nothing about its ownership or operations. TalentCrowd’s actual office was located at 125 S Highway 101, Suite 1060, Solana Beach, California 92075 — a coastal town just minutes from the La Jolla headquarters where Lintz had spent the previous twenty-two months learning everything there was to know about running a technology staffing company.

Lintz later addressed TalentCrowd’s creation under oath. His testimony, quoted verbatim in the complaint, is remarkable for what it concedes: “On February 14, 2022, and with the express authorization of Davis in his capacity as the Manager of TopDevz, organized Talentcrowd.”

That single sentence confirms several things simultaneously. Lintz does not deny founding TalentCrowd. He does not deny that its creation occurred during the same period as the mass data extraction. He does not deny that Davis was involved in the decision. What he asserts is authorization — that Davis, acting as “Manager of TopDevz,” gave him permission.

The complaint dismantles this defense in precise terms. TopDevz was a manager-managed LLC. Davis held a 49% minority stake. He was not the manager. Rajaee was. Davis had no authority to authorize anyone to do anything on TopDevz’s behalf. His “authorization,” in the complaint’s framing, was one alleged conspirator giving another alleged conspirator a permission slip that neither had the legal right to issue.

But Lintz’s sworn testimony establishes the timeline that the complaint builds its case around: conspiracy formed in January, data extracted in January, company incorporated in February. All within sixty days. And the person who incorporated TalentCrowd was the same person who had spent twenty-two months as COO with total access to every system, every client, every contractor, and every trade secret that TopDevz possessed.

The Redirect

With TalentCrowd incorporated and the stolen data in hand, the transition began.

According to the complaint, Amanda Frye — the same person who had downloaded the entire Zoho Recruit database on January 14 — directed TopDevz contractors through Slack to switch their work from legitimate TopDevz systems to a fraudulent domain: topdevz.io. The real company operated at topdevz.com. The .io domain was, the complaint alleges, a waystation — a mechanism to redirect an active contractor workforce away from the legitimate company and toward infrastructure controlled by the conspirators.

The Slack messages described in the filing suggest something brazen. Contractors who had been working for TopDevz on Monday were being told to route their hours through a different system by Friday. Same developers. Same clients. Same projects. Different company collecting the revenue.

From topdevz.io, the workforce was migrated again — this time to TalentCrowd. The complaint describes this as a two-step redirect designed to move TopDevz’s entire operational capacity, its thousands of active contractors, from the legitimate company to the replacement without the contractors themselves necessarily understanding what was happening. They were still doing the same work. They were just being told to log it somewhere else.

Meanwhile, Lintz was being paid from both sides. The complaint alleges he received $722,335.83 in direct payments from TopDevz’s JPMorgan Chase bank account — an account the filing contends Davis and the enterprise’s attorneys controlled without lawful authorization. The complaint describes these payments as proceeds of racketeering: money flowing from the company being dismantled to the person building its replacement.

That $722,335.83 was on top of whatever Lintz earned as TalentCrowd’s founder and principal. Double-dipping, the complaint implies, from the old company and the new one simultaneously.

Ninety Thousand Hours

The speed at which TalentCrowd became operational is, in the complaint’s telling, the most damning evidence of what it was built on.

In March 2023, Amanda Frye made a public statement that the filing treats as an inadvertent admission. Frye boasted that TalentCrowd had “logged almost 90,000 hours of service” in its first year of operation.

The math tells the story. At standard industry billing rates for technology staffing, 90,000 hours of service translates to somewhere between $10 million and $12 million in annual revenue. In year one.

Under ordinary circumstances, building a technology staffing company to that scale takes years. You need to recruit contractors, vet their skills, build client relationships, develop operational processes, establish a track record. TalentCrowd did none of that publicly. There was no announced funding round. No visible recruiting campaign. No press release about a major client win. The company simply appeared in early 2022 and, within twelve months, was billing like a firm that had been operating for a decade.

The complaint’s explanation is straightforward: TalentCrowd did not build a contractor network. It inherited one. The Zoho Recruit database that Frye downloaded on January 14, 2022 contained thousands of pre-vetted, pre-qualified technology professionals, many of whom were already actively engaged on client projects. The financial records Garcia downloaded documented every client relationship, every billing rate, every payment term. The operational knowledge Lintz carried from twenty-two months as COO filled in the gaps that no database could.

TalentCrowd was TopDevz under a new name, generating revenue from the same contractors serving the same clients through the same operational model — but with the original company’s records conveniently deleted from Jira and its ownership conveniently disputed in court.

The CEO Who Wasn’t

There is one additional detail in the complaint that illuminates the nature of what Lintz is accused of. According to the filing, Lintz falsely held himself out as the “CEO” of TopDevz.

He was not the CEO. He was never the CEO. He was the COO — a significant title, but one that operates under the direction of the company’s actual leadership. The distinction matters because it suggests something beyond mere operational theft. The complaint paints a picture of someone who was not content to run the company for someone else. The allegation is that Lintz wanted to be the person in charge, and when the legitimate structure of TopDevz did not give him that authority, he allegedly took everything he needed to build a company where he would have it.

At TalentCrowd, there was no Rajaee above him. No manager-managed LLC constraining his authority. The company was his, built — the complaint alleges — on everything he took on his way out.

The Acquisition

For nearly three years, TalentCrowd operated from its Solana Beach address, generating revenue from what the complaint characterizes as a stolen database of 2.5 million records. Then, in February 2025, the company was acquired.

GBQ Partners LLC, a professional services firm headquartered in Ohio, announced the deal on January 31, 2025. GBQ is an established firm with operations in accounting, tax, advisory, and consulting. Its press release described the acquisition as a strategic expansion into “on-demand talent solutions.”

The complaint alleges GBQ purchased TalentCrowd with actual or constructive knowledge of what it was buying. At the time of the acquisition, multiple pending lawsuits named TalentCrowd and its principals. The court dockets were publicly accessible. The compressed timeline between TopDevz’s January 2022 collapse and TalentCrowd’s February 2022 incorporation was documented in filings anyone could read.

What GBQ did after the acquisition tells its own story. GBQ retained Josh Lintz. GBQ retained Amanda Frye, installing her as CEO. GBQ retained Melissa Garcia — who had downloaded 3,784 files from TopDevz’s email accounts — as Chief Administrative Officer. The three individuals most central to the alleged data extraction were all given leadership positions at the company that bought the operation they had allegedly built on stolen assets.

The complaint contends the stolen database continues to generate revenue exceeding $50,000 per day under GBQ’s ownership. Each day of continued operation, the filing argues, constitutes an additional predicate act under 18 U.S.C. section 1832, the federal trade secrets statute. The meter, in other words, is still running.

The Bankruptcy and Beyond

The final chapter of the complaint’s narrative involves the bankruptcy proceedings that followed TopDevz’s collapse. When Rajaee filed for Chapter 11 protection in February 2024, the enterprise allegedly adapted. D. Edward Hays entered the picture, filing what the complaint describes as false declarations under penalty of perjury. Christopher Barclay, the court-appointed Chapter 7 trustee, is accused in a separate adversary proceeding of settling $75 million in claims for $200,000.

Through all of it, TalentCrowd kept running. The stolen database kept generating revenue. The contractors who had been redirected from TopDevz in early 2022 kept billing hours through the replacement infrastructure. The complaint argues that these ongoing operations constitute continuing racketeering activity that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy because the acts arose after the filing date.

The enterprise, as the complaint describes it, did not pause for litigation. It adapted to it.

The Anatomy of an Inside Job

Corporate security professionals have a name for what the complaint alleges Josh Lintz did. They call it the trusted-insider threat, and it remains the single most difficult attack vector for any organization to defend against.

An external attacker faces obstacles at every stage. They need to identify what is valuable. They need to breach the perimeter. They need to navigate unfamiliar systems. They need to exfiltrate data without detection. Every step carries risk of discovery.

An insider faces none of those barriers. The insider already has credentials. The insider already knows the topology of the systems. The insider already understands what is valuable and where it is stored. The insider has been given access precisely because the organization trusts them to use it responsibly.

The complaint describes a conversion that took less than sixty days from initiation to incorporation. January 2022: join the conspiracy, extract the data, delete the evidence. February 2022: incorporate TalentCrowd. By spring, the replacement company was operational. By the end of its first year, it was billing $12 million.

The speed of the alleged operation is what makes it so striking. Everything that normally takes years — recruiting contractors, building client relationships, developing operational processes — was allegedly accomplished in weeks, because the person executing it had already spent twenty-two months learning exactly how the business worked from the inside.

This is not a story about hackers or outsiders. It is a story, as the complaint tells it, about a handshake, a salary, a set of passwords, and what happened when the person who received all of those things allegedly decided to use them for something other than what they were given for.

Where It Stands

The RICO complaint remains pending before the United States District Court for the Southern District of California. The case names fifteen defendants across what the filing describes as a coordinated criminal enterprise spanning eight years and over 750 predicate acts.

Joshua Paul Lintz has not been convicted of any crime in connection with the conduct alleged above. All allegations described in this article are civil claims contained in a filed complaint. No findings of fact have been made by the court. TalentCrowd continues to operate under GBQ Partners’ ownership.

The database, if the complaint’s allegations are proven, is still generating revenue. The contractors are still billing hours. The clients are still being served. The only thing that changed, the complaint alleges, was the name on the letterhead and the people collecting the checks.

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The full court filing referenced in this article is available for download: View complaint (PDF). Additional source documentation: www.dropbox.com. All allegations are civil claims in a filed complaint; no findings have been made by any court.