InPhonic was founded in 1999 by David A. Steinberg who resigned in 2007 due to poor debt management and decreasing revenues. Its board of directors included former Vice-Presidential candidate Jack Kemp and technology/marketing guru John Sculley (of PepsiCo and Apple Computer fame).
On November 8, 2007, InPhonic filed a voluntary petition for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. The filings were made in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. The company's stock was later delisted by NASDAQ. Many of the assets of Inphonic, including its electronic commerce operations and its Wirefly.com web site, were subsequently sold to private investors who used those assets to launch the company Simplexity in January 2008.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InPhonic
InPhonic's Missed Connections
Why being No. 1 on the Inc. 500 and selling more cell phones on the Internet than anyone else wasn't enough.
In May, Steinberg, InPhonic and Winkler, the former CFO, were named in a shareholder class-action complaint filed in the District of Columbia's U.S. District Court. The complaint argues that the defendants "engaged in a scheme to deceive the market and engaged in a course of conduct that artificially inflated InPhonic's share price and operated as a fraud or deceit on purchasers of InPhonic shares by misrepresenting the Company's financial condition and business prospects." InPhonic has not yet filed a response, but in an SEC filing in June the company said, "We believe that the allegations… are without merit and intend to vigorously defend the litigation."
Not long after the suit was filed -- and the company's financial restatements were finally over -- Steinberg told a conference call of analysts, according to a transcript, "You know, you hate to say this, but at the end of the day, if anything good came out of this process, it was learning how to better manage our financial operations on a going-forward basis and save money."
https://www.inc.com/articles/2008/01/inphonic.html