There was a huge financial fraud involving a Belgian company, Lernout & Hauspie, which acquired many of the other startups doing voice recognition and then went

There was a huge financial fraud involving a Belgian company, Lernout & Hauspie, which acquired many of the other startups doing voice recognition and then went bust. The guy who built Dragon NaturallySpeaking and owned Dragon Systems was paid in ultimately completely worthless shares of L&H. The technology was bought out of bankruptcy and successfully commercialized. One of the two guys involved in the fraud claimed he was a victim of a CIA conspiracy, although the other one admitted the fraud.