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.
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Episodes
The archive
22 episodes, newest first.
- Few and Far: The $10M DJ FundDerek and Grant take apart the August 2026 federal indictment of Few and Far founder Taj Tarsha, who allegedly turned a Pantera-led NFT marketplace round into a Miami condo, an online casino balance, and a DJ hobby. The real story is the audit that caught it in 2023 and the years the company kept running anyway.
- CaaStle: Sentencing Day for a $283M LieChristine Hunsicker faces Judge Oetken in Manhattan federal court today, and Derek and Grant return to the CaaStle file to weigh the forged audits against the number the judge actually hands down.
- CaaStle: Googling How to Fake an AuditDerek and Grant reconstruct how CaaStle founder Christine Hunsicker forged audits, invented shareholders, and took nearly $300 million from venture investors, days before her federal sentencing.
- SpaceX: The $28.5 Trillion Promise CracksDerek and Grant revisit SpaceX's record-breaking IPO one month later, checking the S-1's audacious $28.5 trillion market claim against a stock that's now trading below its offer price.
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- Polymarket: The $140 Million Fake WinDerek and Grant reconstruct how a prediction market built its entire brand on blockchain transparency while allegedly staging fake winning bets on counterfeit lookalike sites, and follow the story from a viral Coffeezilla takedown to a congressional insider-trading probe threatening the company's valuation.
- The $55 Billion Hallucination: AI's Fraud GenreDerek and Grant zoom out from the Nate App playbook to ask whether AI capability fraud has become an industrialized genre, tracing Cluely's ARR confession, SEC AI-washing enforcement, and the economics that make the lie irresistible.
- Charles Cole: The $3 Billion That Never ExistedA North Carolina man named Charles Cole walked away with 239 million shares of Napster's parent company by faking a Malaysian bank, forging statements, and promising $3.36 billion he never had. Derek and Grant reconstruct the full con, from first pitch to federal charges.
- SpaceX: The S-1 That Claims 22% of All MoneyThe most anticipated IPO in history just went public with a prospectus claiming a $28.5 trillion addressable market. Derek and Grant read the receipts on why critics are calling it the oldest pitch in Silicon Valley dressed up in rocket fuel.
- Aspiration: The Green Grift That Cost $248 MillionJoseph Sanberg built a celebrity-backed green bank on trees, good intentions, and $248 million worth of lies. Derek and Grant reconstruct how the ESG moral shield kept skeptics quiet while Sanberg paid his own fake customers and forged audit letters to stay afloat.
- Nate App: The AI That Was Just PeopleFrom a chess-playing cabinet in 1770 Vienna to a shopping app powered by call centers in Manila, Derek and Grant trace 250 years of humans hiding inside machines sold as autonomous tech, ending with the DOJ charges that finally named the con.
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.
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