Technology
Vaporware
Every satisfying tech fraud started with a pitch that sounded too good to be true, and a room full of people who wanted to believe it.
Listen on
Episodes
The archive
22 episodes, newest first.
- Wirecard: The €1.9 Billion That Never WasWirecard was a DAX darling, and prosecutors say about €1.9 billion of its cash was supposed to sit in trustee accounts at two Philippine banks. The Philippine central bank said that money never entered its system. Now Markus Braun has spent more than six years in pretrial detention while a Munich court works through Germany's biggest post-war fraud case. This episode lays out the missing trustee-account cash, the central bank's denial, and the charges: commercial gang fraud, breach of trust, accounting fraud and market manipulation. It also covers why a fugitive named Jan Marsalek sits at the center of the defense story, and what the court's key witness says about it. It follows the journalists who were investigated for being right, and the regulator that banned short selling of the stock after the Financial Times reported on the company. Plus: a fintech fraud with no crypto anywhere in it, and a trial still waiting on its verdict. Next time, another pitch that sounded too good to check.
- Theranos: The Sequel Nobody Asked ForElizabeth Holmes is back in the news, and this time there's a camera crew. Nathan Fielder's A24 documentary 'You Can See Everything' filmed Holmes and her partner Billy Evans before she reported to prison, and it gives us a reason to revisit the canonical tech con. Derek and Grant look at how the Theranos pitch worked and why a room of smart people believed it, then follow the current facts: a sentence that has been cut, a scheduled move to a Texas halfway house in August 2027, and reports that a new blood-testing startup tied to her partner has raised money. They ask whether the story is over or whether the same pitch is being run again. Fraud losses ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and the question of who gets believed next is still open. Next time, another pitch that sounded too good to check.
- Nate: The AI That Was Just PeopleWhat if the artificial intelligence behind a shopping app was really a room full of people typing? Prosecutors say that is exactly what happened at Nate, the startup founded by Albert Saniger, who has pleaded not guilty. According to the SEC, Saniger raised more than $42 million from Seed and Series A investors between spring 2019 and December 2022 by claiming the app completed purchases with AI and no human involvement. Nate reportedly stopped operating in 2023, leaving investors with large losses, and all of this remains allegation. In this episode, Derek and Grant walk through the staged demos investors allegedly saw, the 93 to 97 percent automation claims, and the Justice Department's description of the real automation rate as effectively zero. They also look at why this is being called the first criminal test of whether a human-powered AI pitch counts as securities fraud. It is one more entry in the long tradition of the human behind the curtain, now dressed up as AI-washing.
- Kishu Inu: The Fair Launch StashA dog-themed token was sold as a fair launch with no team allocation. Prosecutors now say its founder quietly held about 6% of the supply and sold it for more than $9 million. Reports put the token's market cap peak above $1.6 billion, with about 283,000 holders, and describe sales running from April 2021 to at least October 2023. This episode rebuilds the pitch and the Telegram-era hype, then shows how a public wallet trace can contradict a founder's own words. It also sets the case beside two recent collapses, Zondacrypto and Linqto, to see what they share and where they differ. The charges are allegations, and the founder is presumed innocent. It is one more story about how often the only protection a buyer has is a promise that nobody can easily verify.
Show moreShow less
- Beyond Alpha: Shares That Never ExistedProsecutors say a hedge fund sold pre-IPO shares and an AI trading engine that never existed. This episode looks at Beyond Alpha Ventures, where two men are accused of taking about $8.7 million from roughly 35 investors. Derek and Grant rebuild the pitch, look at the credibility badges the firm advertised, including a Forbes Finance Council profile and a 'Hedge Fund to Watch' award, and run through the checks an investor could have made before wiring money. Along the way they set the case beside Linqto, where the allegations are about marked-up real access, and ask why pre-IPO FOMO keeps working. All charges are allegations. Next, we look at another pitch that looked better on a website than it did on paper.
- Joonko: The AI That Was Forged PaperIlit Raz built Joonko as an AI-powered diversity-hiring startup that supposedly matched 100,000 candidates with Fortune 500 clients, then raised roughly $27 million on forged bank statements and invented customers. Derek and Grant reconstruct how the SEC first flagged the scheme in 2024, how Raz's fabricated purchase orders and phony testimonials unraveled, and how her September 2026 guilty plea in Manhattan federal court left her facing up to 20 years in prison. Along the way, they trace the SEC's broader 2024-2026 AI-washing enforcement arc and a May 2026 FTC case built on a fake ad-targeting tool, arguing the genre isn't cooling off, it's just generating more paperwork. The episode closes by tying Joonko into the show's running argument about Silicon Valley's AI credulity problem, and teases where that pattern shows up next.
- mIQroTech: The 30 Under 30 That Built NothingIn 2022, Forbes anointed Meade Lewis a 30 Under 30 energy-tech wunderkind. This month he pleaded guilty to wire fraud, agreeing to forfeit $7.1 million and facing up to 20 years. Derek and Grant reconstruct how a credentialed founder raised over $7 million on claims mIQroTech's own numbers couldn't back up, tracing the story from the Forbes profile that vouched for him through a civil suit, a contempt jailing, a federal indictment, and finally the guilty plea headed to an October 13 hearing in Tampa. Along the way they dig into what investors were actually shown, what the company could actually produce, and how a magazine list became a due-diligence shortcut nobody double-checked. It's a fresh case, not old news, and it's the latest entry in a pattern the hosts keep tracing across hardware and deep-tech pitches that never quite ship.
- Linqto: The $450M Markup MachineFor years, Linqto sold itself as the great equalizer of pre-IPO investing, promising ordinary people a seat at the table with SpaceX, Ripple, and Anthropic. This episode traces how founder William Sarris allegedly turned that promise into a $450 million markup machine, using fake sold-out listings, a manually tuned 'automated' pricing engine, and a maze of investor-capped SPVs to squeeze extra margin out of every trade. We dig into the September 2026 federal indictment, the ex-CEO who already flipped, and a compensation package prosecutors say paid Sarris to keep the numbers inflated. Then we follow the money into Linqto's bankruptcy, where thousands of customers are still waiting to find out what their pre-IPO dreams are actually worth. Next time: what happens when the hype machine and the middleman are the same company.
- Zondacrypto: Poland's Vanishing BitcoinPoland's largest crypto exchange lost 99.7% of its Bitcoin reserves, and nobody can find the man who allegedly holds the only key. Derek and Grant reconstruct the collapse of Zondacrypto, born as BitBay in 2014, rebranded in 2021, and gutted by 2026 to the tune of roughly $97 million in losses. The episode traces founder Sylwester Suszek's 2022 disappearance, the on-chain forensics that caught a hot wallet quietly draining to almost nothing, and how a small Polish exchange scandal escalated into Prime Minister Tusk publicly fighting his own president over a vetoed crypto law. It's an FTX-shaped story that somehow never crossed American front pages. Next time: another company that convinced everyone the money was still there, right up until it wasn't.
- Evergrande: The $300B Ponzi SkyscraperHui Ka Yan built more housing than most countries and then got sentenced to life in prison for lying about it. This episode traces the rise of Evergrande's founder from rags-to-riches property tycoon to the center of a fraud so large regulators say his companies fabricated hundreds of billions of yuan in sales just to keep the money coming. Derek and Grant walk through how the numbers were faked, why the company's own auditor got fined a record sum for looking away, and how a $300 billion pile of debt finally forced a Hong Kong court to order liquidation before Chinese courts handed down the sentence. Along the way they ask the question that hangs over every mega-fraud: at what size does a lie stop looking like a lie and start looking like the economy? Next time, the hosts start digging into the tech-adjacent frauds that never made it onto American front pages.
Talent
Talents in this show
Each one has a profile of their own.
About
What the show is
Vaporware tells the stories of technology's most spectacular cons, from 19th-century telegraph swindles to billion-dollar startup collapses. Each episode reconstructs how the fraud worked, who fell for it, and what warning signs everyone missed. Built for skeptics, founders, investors, and anyone who's ever wondered how Elizabeth Holmes convinced a room of billionaires that her box worked. Two hosts pick apart one con per episode, following the money and the psychology behind the biggest lies the tech industry ever told.
More shows
Elsewhere in the directory
Every one of them is made with Mato.
