I feel like the story of the scorpion and the frog applies here. My solution is to try very, very hard not to engage with people I do not trust.
My mantra is "good people do good things, bad people do bad things". If you don't want bad things to happen to you, stay away from people you know to be bad regardless of how tempting it may be to associate with them.
Indeed. It was poor decisionmaking on my part. I was blinded by the $$. My attorney tried to warn me off of doing the deal at all. He had done his due diligence and looked into the company, and told me outright that the company was shady.
That was another thing I learned: if you respect someone's expertise enough to pay them for it, you should probably take what they have to say very seriously.
My mantra is "good people do good things, bad people do bad things". If you don't want bad things to happen to you, stay away from people you know to be bad regardless of how tempting it may be to associate with them.