Vendors and former staff claim Fanboys Marketplace owner Mike Rogers owes over $23,000 to about 20 vendors at the former Golden Triangle Mall location, which closed suddenly in May.
Rogers is also accused of embezzling money from vendors to support other Fanboys Marketplace locations around Dallas-Fort Worth and making false cybersecurity allegations against two former managers from the Denton location.
The store was known for its comic book items, figurines and various other pop culture items. Vendors rented booths to sell their merchandise.
Former vendor Daniel Worth sold Funko Pop figurines, T-shirts and action figures at Fanboys beginning in the summer of 2022.
He said Rogers hadn’t paid him since March and owes him about $2,443. He said he has sent three separate emails with invoices, and Rogers has not responded to any of them.
“It seems like these guys are kind of swindlers and have no intention of paying anyone what they’re owed,” Worth said. “The lack of communication and ignoring this debt is kind of become painfully obvious that they have no intention of paying this debt.”
“Many of these people have not been paid, and they got upset,” former Fanboys Marketplace Denton manager Leslie Lamar said. “They got tired of their merchandise being sold and not being compensated for it. A couple of these people, these vendors, were ... literally living off of the money that came from Fanboys.”
Former vendors speak out
The Denton Record-Chronicle obtained screenshots of text messages between Lamar, Rogers and Fanboys Marketplace President Lisa Montgomery.
The text messages purportedly show Lamar discussing the business’s lack of money with which to pay its vendors.

Former vendor Barry Kilbane, who sold LED character signs at the store for about a year, said Rogers owes him around $500.
Kilbane claims that Rogers is withholding the money because Rogers is paying the debt he owes at the other Fanboys locations.
All Fanboys Marketplace locations around the DFW area have been shut down, with the exception of the Fort Worth location.
“So, we think he just got too big too fast,” Kilbane said. “And he was using the Denton location and our money to supplement or pay his bills at the other places.”
Rogers has not responded to the Denton Record-Chronicle’s requests for clarification about his alleged debts and the alleged cybersecurity issue.
Kilbane said he had contacted Rogers about the overdue payments and claimed Rogers pointed to audit issues. Kilbane said there was no need to audit his items since he generally sold only about 15 to 20 items a month.
“There’s not a whole lot to audit,” Kilbane said. “We’re talking 20 items at the most on any given month, and he said in an email that adjustments will be made.”
Rick Robbins, another vendor, said Rogers owes him about $1,800 from the Funko Pop figures he sold at the store. Robbins was one of the few vendors kicked out of the store before its closure. Rogers claimed Robbins violated a nondisclosure agreement.
Robbins said he reached out to a vendor from a Facebook group who said they hadn’t received their invoices from the company.
He then explained why the vendor wouldn’t get paid.
“So that person I was talking to took a screenshot of that, sent it to Mike, and I was immediately kicked out of [Fanboys],” Robbins said. “Mike said that I violated a nondisclosure agreement.”
Lamar said that, technically, Robbins did not violate the contract since he wasn’t getting paid every 30 days.
Lamar also said Rogers owes her daughter about $2,000 in vendor payments from products she sold at the store. Lamar’s daughter, Rachel Howard, also helped manage the Denton store, and Lamar said Rogers also owes both of them their paychecks.
Cybersecurity allegations
The Record-Chronicle reported last month that Rogers filed a formal complaint with the FBI accusing former managers — Lamar and Howard — of accessing the company’s social media accounts without permission, posting inappropriate things online using those accounts and then locking those accounts to other people in the company.
Fanboys Marketplace Denton’s contract with Golden Triangle Mall was terminated on May 31, and the store employees had to vacate the building by June 3. The alleged cybersecurity issue occurred on June 1.
The former managers were helping vendors clear out the space due to the store’s closure. Lamar said she was confused when she saw a Denton police officer outside the store waiting for Rogers on June 1.
Rogers arrived and told Lamar and Howard they were fired due to the alleged cybersecurity issues.
The two women were shocked to hear Rogers’ allegations. Frustration occurred when Lamar had had enough and started to yell at Rogers for the accusation and for not paying the vendors, she said.
“I was yelling at Mike,” Lamar said. “I said, ‘You are stealing from these people — you’re taking their merchandise and selling it and not giving them their money.’ And he just stood there and smiled and like smirked at us and nodded his head.”
Lamar said the last time her daughter tried to use the Fanboys Facebook account was to notify vendors to pack their items out of the store due to the closure.
However, Howard was denied access to Facebook and Fanboys’ other social media accounts.
“She [Howard] couldn’t do anything — she couldn’t get into Instagram, couldn’t get into TikTok — she didn’t get in anything on Tuesday,” Lamar said. “And on Thursday, we’re getting fired for a cyberattack that happened on Thursday. So how did we do it? If we had no access to it?”
Rogers also claimed the two had wiped out computer data from the store before they were fired.
Lamar said they had no access to the computer since she saw Rogers take the computer out of the store before the alleged cybersecurity issues occurred.
Issues at the Denton location
Lamar said the financial issues started in December last year, but vendor payments continued through February, although the January payment was delayed. The nonpayment issues started occurring in March.
Lamar said Rogers claimed someone stole money from the Fanboys bank account, delaying the January payment.
Lamar claimed Rogers took out loans and used the vendors’ money to pay off his debt. Issues continued to occur as Rogers continued to change accounts for banking and Square, the store’s payment processing system.

Kilbane said he became suspicious of the nonpayment when he heard that Rogers kept changing banks.
“He went from computer-printed checks to paper handwritten checks next month,” Kilbane said. “It started back in December, and then it was another bank the next month, and then [checks] were delayed.”
As for the cybersecurity accusation, Kilbane believes Rogers threw Lamar and Howard under the bus, blaming the two women for the issues at the Denton store.
He said Lamar and Howard did everything for the company, and former vendors are frustrated that Rogers blamed the two for alleged cybersecurity problems.
“He’s one of these types of people that can’t accept responsibility,” Kilbane said. “They’ve got to blame everybody else, and they were trying to protect themselves.”
Lamar claims Rogers kept all of the funds from credit card sales at the store.
“They were keeping all of our credit card sales,” Lamar said of Rogers. “All I had was access to our cash sales, and it was causing our store not to be able to pay vendors. It meant [Rogers was] getting the money. They were spending it how they wanted to, and we weren’t able to pay our vendors.”
Lamar claims Rogers asked her and her daughter to file for unemployment so they could continue receiving some kind of income while still working at the store.
“We told them that that was illegal, that we were not going to file for unemployment,” Lamar said.
Both decided to accept a pay cut instead.
Lamar said she questioned Rogers’ decision to move from one mall storefront to another, and she said she was then blamed for the store’s closure because Fanboys had only a temporary contract with Golden Triangle Mall.
She saw Rogers sign the mall contract, but he blamed Lamar for signing it, she said.
It was a temporary lease contract instead of a permanent lease — which meant that the mall management could opt to end the lease and require them to vacate the space.
The store closed down so that the mall could make room for a new national retailer.
Lamar said an anonymous mall employee caught on to the nonpayment issues when a former Fanboys vendor asked about leasing a kiosk at the mall. Lamar couldn’t tell the mall employee all of the issues but did say the store was having problems.
Aftermath
The aftermath of the cybersecurity allegations has left Lamar and her daughter confused, and she said it has taken a toll on their mental health.
“It’s taking a serious mental and emotional toll on me and my daughter dealing with this when we did absolutely nothing wrong,” Lamar said. “We had nothing to do with the social media stuff. We had nothing to do with the store’s failure.”
Vendors want Rogers to pay them, and a few are considering suing him. Kilbane said he wants to spread the word to other vendors who are considering working with Rogers.
“We don’t want him doing this to other people. … He’s going on as if nothing happened,” Kilbane said.
JUAN BETANCOURT can be reached via Twitter at @jbetancourt_15.