There's fraud in the air

For better or worse, I’ve been down the rabbit hole of reading about recent fraud in the startup and tech world today. This was sparked by two incidents:

1) One in which I narrowly avoided being deceived. This happened over a year ago and this situation seems to be coming to a close. Naturally, it brought up repressed memories.

2) I received an email today from an executive at a publicly traded company that blasted me and Secfi for being “up to speed on the latest meme stocks.” He called his company a top 10 meme stock.

(I’m purposely being vague and not disclosing much detail due to privacy and confidentiality concerns. I wish I could talk about it more.)

After not being to get the two incidents out of my head today, I did a bunch of research on a few other fraudulent incidents over the past few months. I listened to a podcast about another tech company that we were reviewing 2 years ago and luckily passed on working with. Turns out they too were misleading investors and there was some fraud discovered after they had gone public earlier this year.

What a time and world we live in. Greed is out of control. Fraud is in the air and in plain sight.

There’s a lot of amazing founders and operators out there building some great companies that will benefit society. Unfortunately there’s a whole mess of grifters as well taking advantage of the excess supply of money.

A lot of this is candidly hard to ignore. I feel like I run into these potentially sketchy situations way too often. Again, purposely being vague here, but there may be one or two big VC backed startups that I am aware of that may have some rippling effects throughout the VC backed startup world.

I’m not sure as they’re just gut feelings at this point, but things aren’t adding up and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few more big incidents pop up in the next coming year or two.