The family of the late Tony Hsieh says that a mysterious document purported to be a will left behind by the former Zappos CEO is a forgery.
An attorney for Richard Hsieh (pronounced “SHAY”), who has been managing the $500 million estate since his son died of injuries from a fire in 2020, filed a formal objection on Monday calling the purported will a “scam.”
“Scams come in all shapes and sizes,” attorneys for Hsieh’s family said in Monday’s filing, the existence of which was reported by the Wall Street Journal.
“In this case, the scam is in the form of a document being touted as the purported will of Anthony ‘Tony’ Hsieh.”
According to the Journal, Hsieh’s next of kin hired an expert in counterfeit-document detection who concluded that the late CEO’s signatures on the mysterious document are forgeries.
The family also hired a linguistics expert who found that the language used in the document was not drafted by trained lawyers.
The purported will was instead written by “non-native speakers of English,” Hsieh family lawyers said in a court document.
The purported will was presented to the court by a man who identified himself as Kashif Singh, who claimed he discovered the document among the belongings of his grandfather, Pir Muhammad, after Muhammad’s death.
According to the filing, Singh said Muhammad suffered from dementia before he died.
The document names Robert Armstrong, a prominent Nevada estate attorney, as a co-executor of Hsieh’s estate.
Armstrong has said he never met Hsieh and was not involved in any estate planning for the Zappos founder.
In a court filing, Armstrong said he received a call from a man identifying himself as Singh shortly after learning he had been named in the purported will.
Attorneys for the Hsieh family said they have repeatedly tried to contact Singh by letter, phone and email but have received no response.
Tony Hsieh, who sold online shoe retailer Zappos to Amazon for about $1.2 billion in 2009, died in November 2020 after suffering injuries in a house fire. He was 46.
At the time of his death, it was widely believed that Hsieh had no will, prompting a Nevada court to appoint his father as administrator of the estate.
The purported will includes a no-contest clause warning Hsieh’s four remaining family members that if any of them challenge the document, all would receive nothing.
A court hearing is scheduled for Thursday in Las Vegas, where a judge is expected to address the family’s objection and the future of the contested document.
Singh, the Hsieh estate and Armstrong were not immediately available for comment.
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