Man Arrested For Conning Investors About Face-Recognition System

Scams

from the can-you-recognize-this-face? dept

alex writes in with a link to a story about a con man who was arrested for lying to investors about a face recognition system he claimed to be developing to help identify terrorists. Trouble was, he wasn’t actually working on any such thing – he was working on scamming investors. The article linked above doesn’t give many details, but other articles on the arrest point out that he conned 32 people out of half a million dollars (while another half a million dollars was raised for another fraudulent company the same guy was running under a different name). Once again, it makes you wonder what kind of due diligence these investors do. Apparently, with the face recognition company, investors were told that they had patents pending, that they employed high ranking former Netscape executives, and that they were close to doing an IPO. All of these should have been fairly easy to confirm or disprove.