VC-backed startups commit more fraud, and researchers think they know why
A new report from the U.K.’s Imperial College and France’s Emlyon Business School has mapped out the ways Silicon Valley’s VC-backed founders commit fraud — and the role investors play. For the report, published online in June, researchers built a database of tech founders and companies who faced civil and criminal securities fraud prosecutions from the SEC and DOJ between 2000 and 2023. Some famous cases of tech founders being convicted of fraud over the past few years include Frank’s Charlie Javice, Kalder’s Gökçe Güven, Terraform Labs’ Do Kwon, and GameOn’s Alexander and Valerie Lau Beckman.
- ▪A new report from the U.K.’s Imperial College and France’s Emlyon Business School has mapped out the ways Silicon Valley’s VC-backed founders commit fraud — and the role investors play.
- ▪For the report, published online in June, researchers built a database of tech founders and companies who faced civil and criminal securities fraud prosecutions from the SEC and DOJ between 2000 and 2023.
- ▪Some famous cases of tech founders being convicted of fraud over the past few years include Frank’s Charlie Javice, Kalder’s Gökçe Güven, Terraform Labs’ Do Kwon, and GameOn’s Alexander and Valerie Lau Beckman.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/31/vc-backed-startups-commit-more-fraud-and-researchers-think-they-know-why/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-31T19:04:00.832Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-31T19:04:00.832Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Zgj5s1eEKfo- · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A new report from the U.K.’s Imperial College and France’s Emlyon Business School has mapped out the ways Silicon Valley’s VC-backed founders commit fraud — and the role investors play. For the report, published online in June, researchers built a database of tech founders and companies who faced civil and criminal securities fraud prosecutions from the SEC and DOJ between 2000 and 2023. Some famous cases of tech founders being convicted of fraud over the past few years include Frank’s Charlie Javice, Kalder’s Gökçe Güven, Terraform Labs’ Do Kwon, and GameOn’s Alexander and Valerie Lau Beckman. All over X, the tech industry’s social network of choice, the topic of fraud and its gentler word “scam” are discussed, as people debate the limits of ambition and success.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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