I'm sure a lot of hype-centric start-ups intentionally try to surf buzzwords. Theranos mostly got in trouble because it made medical claims, which are more hea

I'm sure a lot of hype-centric start-ups intentionally try to surf buzzwords. Theranos mostly got in trouble because it made medical claims, which are more heavily regulated. If I sold a "microservice distributed edge-cloud webscale AI-self-tuned database" and created a working product, ignoring quality and practically, there's very little legal options for investors, unless they can find written evidence of an intentional devious plan. "The concept didn't fly well" by itself is not going to get your money back in court. Thus, pyramidness can be hidden via buzzwords if you go through the typical motions of making a real product. There are cases where lying to investors can make a lawsuit successful, such as using "hidden" humans to fake AI results if you claim an AI product. But that's old-fashioned business fibs. Oracle allegedly pulled a borderline scam of getting their database to "run" on different OS's but never bothering to fix many known glitches on that platform. That allowed them to claim they "ran" on a wider variety of OS's than competitors, when in fact "run" was in name only from a practical perspective. Actually older versions often worked on more OS's, having been tuned over time, but so did competitors'. Oracle implied the latest version ran (practically) on all the listed OS's.