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A Utah-based home alarm company with customers around the country dismissed most of its employees Thursday in a restructuring with an uncertain future.
Platinum Protection of American Fork, which in recent years said it had 140,000 installed customers in its first four years of business, dismissed 65 corporate employees, along with its sales and technical staff, said Mike Melzer, in-house legal counsel. He said the company would not be selling new accounts, but he did not know how many salespeople and technicians lost their jobs.
A small management team remained at work to service existing customers, Melzer said. No one answered customer-service lines on Thursday.
Two employees, who asked not to be identified because they did not want to jeopardize money they are owed by the company, said workers were gathered into a meeting Thursday morning and told they had been dismissed. Officials said they hoped to pay employees what they were owed within a few weeks, one employee said. Melzer declined to say what led the company to dismiss most of its workforce.
Platinum Protection has been closely tied to two Fountain Green men who were recently sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which alleged they were running a Ponzi scheme.
Court records indicate that Wendell Jacobson and son Allen, who are named in the SEC lawsuit, at one point had an ownership interest in Platinum Protection.
But Melzer said any interest by the Jacobsons in Platinum Protection ended last July.
Platinum Protection's assets were frozen for about five days after the SEC sued the Jacobsons and their company, Management Solutions Inc. But U.S. District Judge Bruce Jenkins granted a joint motion by the court-appointed receiver of Management Solutions and Platinum Protection to unfreeze the assets after the American Fork company documented that the Jacobsons did not have ties to the company.
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