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CEO of Cyber Fraud Startup NS8 Arrested by FBI, Facing Fraud Charges

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121–130 of 166 posts

Re: CEO of Cyber Fraud Startup NS8 Arrested by FBI, Facing Fraud Charges

#121

Have VCs started skimping on DD because problems come up so rarely? Lightspeed (who led the last round for these guys) isn't a no-name firm, they invested in Snap, GrubHub, Telegram, etc. Surely they have the experience to find out gigantic major problems like this? This feels like something that should've come up in diligence before they sent them 120 million bucks... There are so many places it could've shown up or…

Based on other comments, NS8 was audited by Ernst-Young and passed. So they had an expert do an audit and find no issues.

>Ernst-Young

Wirecard's long-time auditor!

Re: CEO of Cyber Fraud Startup NS8 Arrested by FBI, Facing Fraud Charges

#122
post #108
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen $GSX, a publicly traded $20B stock on Nasdaq that claims it's growing faster than early Google or Facebook and has been the subject of 5-6 short seller reports and an ongoing SEC investigation?

Seems like the main research company that exposed GSX has made a business out of exposing Chinese public companies https://grizzlyreports.com/research/ Some interesting stuff here. The company of course refuted the research with some vague stuff about APIs having encryption so the data would be wrong. This was back in June and the stock seems to be still going along strong... http://gsx.investorroom.com/2020-06-03-GS…

Muddy Waters got a report on GSX too.

Re: CEO of Cyber Fraud Startup NS8 Arrested by FBI, Facing Fraud Charges

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you're being serious, but if you were an early investor, isn't it on you to make sure the business is legit? Anyone can be misled by a fraudster, but some responsibility lies with the VCs and angel investors throwing money at these companies and enabling this sort of thing to happen.

No, not an investor. Without giving a way too much, we are a company in the technology space. They paid us a fee per user. They paid us fees based on these fake numbers of users that they submitted to their investors. Which means they essentially over paid us what is a lot of money for our small company. We made business decisions around that money in the past and for the future. Now it looks like that not only will…

Sorry to hear that. I dont know what the contract says, but I would be inclined to lawyer up and tell them to get stuffed RE the repayments.

Re: CEO of Cyber Fraud Startup NS8 Arrested by FBI, Facing Fraud Charges

#124
post #102
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regular audits should be standard practice for any company of that size. The company was audited twice, but the auditors tied the fraudulent bank statements to the fraudulent financial statements (woops). > In any case, it will be interesting to see what consequences there are for board members that appear to have failed in their basic responsibilities. Full cooperation with the SEC can get you a long way, especial…

Are you sure they were audited? I havent seen that in the material released so far, only that an auditor was engaged for due diligence, which was fairly cursory, not anywhere near an actual audit. Typically an audit would involve a direct verification of bank balances from the bank. In addition, an audit would typically directly verify customer contracts and make sure big deposits tied out to contracts and invoices.…

Read the DOJ filing, linked in a comment below. The auditor physically sent a person on site whose job was to watch the financial people log into the banks web interface, verify the balance, and print bank statements for the last 12 months, all in front of the auditor. The passage doesn’t make it clear why the auditor didn’t watch the ceo pull the records for the accounts receivables account

Update: filing Is here: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1317641...

Relevant Passage: “As part of its due diligence process, the Audit Firm had an employee (the “Auditor”) conduct a physical site visit at NS8’s offices in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Auditor was directed by a more senior Audit Firm employee to have someone from NS8 log in to the online portal for each NS8 bank account, display the current account balance, and download monthly bank statements for fiscal year 2019.”

“Based on my interview with a member of the NS8 finance department (“Finance Employee-1”), I have learned, among other things, that on or about March 11, 2020, Finance Employee-1 and ROGAS met with the Auditor in ROGAS’s office. The purpose of that meeting was for ROGAS and Finance Employee-1 each to log into the online portals for the bank accounts to which they had access (for ROGAS, the Revenue Bank Account) and download monthly account statements for the Auditor. During that meeting, Finance Employee- 1 logged into the online portal for the Expense Bank Account -- to which Finance Employee-1 had access -- and downloaded monthly account statements. Finance Employee-1 understood that ROGAS was doing the same for the Revenue Bank Account during the meeting”

Re: CEO of Cyber Fraud Startup NS8 Arrested by FBI, Facing Fraud Charges

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. He got caught when it was discovered that the "customer revenue" bank account was being manipulated to look like tens of millions were in there when it was more like tens of thousands. The other bank account had tens of millions in there thanks to the investment money. The layoffs came once the board faced the truth of the matter and Adam Rogas suddenly resigned.

Okay, if that's the order, then yeah, someone should have said something.

My guess is that anyone who ended up "saying something" to the CEO was either quieted by lies or forced out of the business.

Re: CEO of Cyber Fraud Startup NS8 Arrested by FBI, Facing Fraud Charges

#126
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When done right the vacation is sprung on them without notice. In reality they usually know when their vacation is coming so they can alert their cohorts.

The idea is everyone must take vacation (sometimes X+ consecutive days each year), not just the people you suspect of running scams. Giving all of your employees two weeks unannounced vacation at random times is a disruptive way to run a company. It's certainly innovative but I wouldn't say it's HR "done right".

You have to take at least half you annual vacation starting tomorrow. Have fun!

Yeah. That doesn't work. Forcing the same thing in a scheduled way may be a bit of an imposition but isn't unreasonable in general.

Re: CEO of Cyber Fraud Startup NS8 Arrested by FBI, Facing Fraud Charges

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of it makes sense in the context of a well-run business with proper executives in place. That’s because these frauds don’t operate like a well-run business. Usually, the upper management teams are extremely lean. The business is broken up into different silos such that few people can see the big picture. Each is led to believe they are a tiny fraction of the overall revenue, giving them the impression that the b…

Bingo! I worked in the upper management team of an early stage startup where the CEO was lying through his teeth to investors as well as employees. There were only three people at the top level. He was a super charismatic guy and a great story teller. No one thought he was lying until it came time to raise the next round and the lead investor from seed round ran due diligence to find booked revenue was no where close…

> No one thought he was lying until ...

I wonder what happened after that? Could he continue working as if nothing special, just failing to raise money?

Re: CEO of Cyber Fraud Startup NS8 Arrested by FBI, Facing Fraud Charges

#128

Being an executive at a (substantially smaller) SaaS startup I have no idea how having up to 90% of your revenue be fabricated could happen without others knowing: - where are the contracts corresponding to revenue? Yeah they are SaaS focused on SMB but this is a financial product, there will be contracts, NDAs, etc - if the majority of the customers are fake there is such little load on the system. How does engineer…

How would engineering know what the CEO is telling investors? I once had a (majority-share) cofounder CEO who, when the company hit success, became extremely controlling with the books and investor relationships. There was no way for the rest of the cofounders - let alone engineering - to know what was actually going on or what the true state of health of the company was. I (and the other cofounders, and the senior e…

> I (and the other cofounders, and the senior engineering staff) walked away

I wonder what happened after that, how did you leaving affect the company

Re: CEO of Cyber Fraud Startup NS8 Arrested by FBI, Facing Fraud Charges

#130
post #80

Huh, I interviewed with these folks a few years ago. The interview process was quite odd, guess I dodged a bullet.

How was it odd?

Phone screen was super short, like 5 minutes. Followed by a vague exercise to create a tracking service without a database (wat?). Then there was like 2 weeks of back and forth emails for scheduling for a review until they said they needed someone with "stronger programming skills".
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