The Latest Scam Trend: Imitation VCs
from the VC-phishing? dept
Apparently, the latest big money scam is for people to set up a fake organization pretending to be associated with a well known venture capital firm. The scammers use that front, and the air of legitimacy, to trick all kinds of investors out of their money. This trend was probably inevitable, following the story last year where a guy simply using "sophisticated Wall Street lingo" (such as "stock purchase agreement" and "promissory note") was able to fool a bunch of Wall Street brokers and tech execs into believing he worked at Kleiner Perkins and could offer them pre-IPO shares in a (at the time) still private Google. Apparently, no one does due diligence any more before simply handing over their money to random strangers with nice business cards (and such fancy lingo).
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