No, no, no. I see this all the time around Theranos ("Hey, there are lots of other fake-it-til-you-make-it companies out there, Theranos just went to extremes"), and I don't think it's accurate, at all.
The line around fraud is really not that gray. If you're lying about current facts for personal gain, that's fraud. You can hype all you want about the future, and most VCs are actually fine with you selling them the "yeah, it's hamster wheels in the backend now, but just wait until we build out our tech and scale!" line (just see all the well funded "AI" startups that just have legions of people "training" the AI), but if you say that it's the whizbang tech right now, but it's really just hamster wheels, that's fraud.
Fraud is not just an extension of "aggressive selling".
The line around fraud is really not that gray. If you're lying about current facts for personal gain, that's fraud. You can hype all you want about the future, and most VCs are actually fine with you selling them the "yeah, it's hamster wheels in the backend now, but just wait until we build out our tech and scale!" line (just see all the well funded "AI" startups that just have legions of people "training" the AI), but if you say that it's the whizbang tech right now, but it's really just hamster wheels, that's fraud.
Fraud is not just an extension of "aggressive selling".