Opened a gold panning business with a partner this year. Business partner formerly worked for a gold panning business teaching gold panning lessons. Plan on expanding business to another location with a third party. We received a letter, as well as our future business partner (third party) stating that we are in violation of a "non-compete" agreement, misappropriation of trade secrets, and our company will be sued and the third party may be sued. Enclosed was a misleading non-compete agreement, with only illegible signatures of other parties (names were not printed), not business partner. This caused third party to believe that somehow my business partner was in fact in violation of a non-compete agreement and frightened out of doing future business because of the threat of a lawsuit. Beside the fact that a non-compete agreement is not valid in the state of California except for a few exceptions which we do not fall under and my business partner never signed one. We also know that the other company threatening to sue us is only speculating that we are using their "trade secrets". We in fact are not using their "trade secrets". They were very vague in the letter, making unfounded allegations stating information, techniques, and trade secrets were being used. They requested that we shut down our business immediately or a lawsuit would be brought toward us and possibly the third party. They are in fact purposely trying to interfere with our business relationship with the third party (third party has a creek and a train running through property which would really kick their butts competetively) us and are harrassing us. Third party was so frightened, they shut down their own website.

Could this possibly be intentional interference with prospective business relations, libel, defamation, slander, fraud, harassment?