If the owner of the site was in on it (adding fake users/content) and passed it off to investors as natural, I can see that as being fraudulent, but what if the

If the owner of the site was in on it (adding fake users/content) and passed it off to investors as natural, I can see that as being fraudulent, but what if the owner legitimately wasn't in on it, as could easily be the case if the "fake" users/content were created by third parties for unrelated reasons and not detected by the owner? Indeed, the concept of using a throwaway per submission in certain circumstances is a well-known part of the culture, which is why I put "fake" in quotation marks -- accounts are only fake if someone erroneously assumes the ratio of humans:accounts would be anywhere near 1:1. And if the latter is not fraud but legitimate usage of the site, then it seems like there could be a huge gray area of plausible deniability that the owner was simply using the site the same way that anyone else could (albeit with a streamlined interface).