Unless there is some kind of clear feud or something, a company has pretty much no incentive to represent the work done by a contractor inaccurately while the c

Unless there is some kind of clear feud or something, a company has pretty much no incentive to represent the work done by a contractor inaccurately while the contractor has a clear motive to overstate their contribution. If it's he said / she said, no one is going to believe the contractor over the company without very good reason. At the end of the day though, whether or not someone did the work can be very easily settled - the person who did the work knows how it was done. If someone can recount the obstacles they faced and how they overcame them, then they either were actively involved in doing the work or are skilled enough that they could have been. If someone can only paint a clear picture about some part of a project, odds are that's the only part they were involved in. Note though that what a contractor worked on and what a startup was happy with are two different things - it is entirely possible a contractor did a lot of work that the customer wound up getting redone to better fit requirements, and the contractor may not even be aware of this. I spent about a year of my life building something for Toyota which I'm incredibly proud of as a feat of engineering, but their priorities changed and they wound up not buying it, so it would be perfectly accurate for them to say nothing they ever possessed was ever built by me. Inconsistencies need to be investigated but they don't automatically mean fraud.