Worst thing I ever witnessed in IT in 20+ years

Heh that's not a good thing, but that's their practices or lack thereof. My favorite was years ago when we had a new partner in Chenai, the tech leads left after the ink was dry on our contracts. A few weeks after that the server performance becomes increasingly dodgy , a few weeks after that service starts to fall away - the usual. We start the RFP process and "of course" we're going to be looking overseas, HARD, so 14 vendors for a CRP with a very large dataset (40-90m contacts) where grooming and hygiening the data is 90% of the work and popping out demographic data, marketing and such are the bread and butter for our firm. We go for a demo, super slick, new firm and one of the tech leads from the old firm it turns out is involved on the new firm. We're in the presentation 40 people in the room and things are looking fine, then I see it, they pulled on a particular demographic and a name caught my eye, my name, in some test data. I turned to my boss and said I think we have a problem, and he goes - how do you know , and I sat for a few second and off the top of my head said - yeah could you do a query on \*star\* , and it's a common word I figure it should come back pretty fast. Sure enough, all our specific test data was in their data - new vendor 1000 miles away, in a separate country , they'd pilfered the software back to their home-town and decided to just walk off and pitch the customer base, with 90 million Americans , Canadians and European detailed data. I walked out of the demo with my boss and we got our lawyers involved , I was out of there a few weeks later, when you get heavily ignored until it's far , far too late, by folks with access but without clues, you look for greener pastures, for obvious reasons. That never made the news, never made the papers except in the most banal way - the credit-cart firms that had used us for their ERP management had outsourced to the point where all their data was in the hands of questionable guys and they'd expatriated it from servers in Philadelphia to Chenai to Lahore to a "server" operation in Abbottabad.....and then back to Ohio and a cloud instance at Amazon with the data under different management.