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Fraud in the startup world is a lot more prevalent than might be well known. NS8, Communiclique, Lordstown Motors, Trustify, and so many have come to light in t

• rsj_hn 6y ago
  People lie about having a startup all the time , or perhaps they incorporate somewhere but lie about having customers/products/employees - all those pesky ingredients necessary to actually have a business. I wouldn't exactly call that fraud in the "startup world", but rather fraud in the investment world, as the goal is to bilk investors. This type of fraud is very common whenever something reaches the public consciousness, but the swarm of conmen selling X doesn't have much to do with the real startup eco-system anymore than someone selling you a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge is a fraud in the bridge world.
  • zeruch 6y ago
    " I wouldn't exactly call that fraud in the "startup world", but rather fraud in the investment world, as the goal is to bilk investors." A noteworthy (and mostly overlooked) distinction.
• deleted 6y ago
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• bsder 6y ago
  > Fraud in the startup world is a lot more prevalent than might be well known. This is quite true. I'd actually estimate it north of 50% given my discussions with various people over the years. I would argue that its probably better than this in the "bootstrapped" arena rather than the VC-funded arena. VC lottery tickets seem to attract fraudsters like flies. > Investors don't do enough due diligence and trust their own gut too much. This is probably true, but one of the real problems is that serial fraudsters really don't get punished. In addition, the bottom-feeding lawyers that enable them also don't get punished. A successful lawsuit against one of these fraudsters will cost you at least a megabuck. It's almost always more cost-effective to walk away with whatever payment you can threaten out of them than to actually file a lawsuit.
• Zhenya 6y ago
  For those wondering about lordstown - first I heard of it " A shareholder lawsuit was filed Thursday against an electric truck startup company claiming it has defrauded investors by making spurious claims about the number of preordered trucks and the progress it has made in starting production " https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lordstown-motors-accused-of-fraud-in-shareholder-lawsuit-01616118078 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lordstown-motors-accused-o...
  • rexreed 6y ago
    It gets even worse than that for Lordstown (from the same source above): "The Hindenburg report said a recently announced $735 million deal for 14,000 trucks was to a purported buyer who doesn’t operate a vehicle fleet and is based out of a small apartment building in Texas. The company received unwelcome publicity in January when a prototype vehicle caught fire 10 minutes into its initial test drive." Smelling increasingly like fraud.
    • Zhenya 6y ago
      So now we have lordstown and nikola. Byton also seemed like vaporwesr for a long time.
      • deleted 6y ago
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