Startup Scammer Steals $1,000,000

We almost had a munity last week - I advised against investing in Throne Labs, but 44% of readers said they would still invest after reading my article.

In today’s newsletter:

• 🏭 Rogue Worker: A former Boxabl employee scams $1M+ from investors

• 🧠 Tri-AI: The 3 AI updates you need to know about

• 💳 Unsolvent: A crypto neobank goes under, and 6,000 investors are affected

Topics on this week’s episode include:

• Elizabeth Holmes must report to prison on May 30

• Montana becomes the first state to ban TikTok

• Is George Santos getting kicked out of Congress?

An ex-Boxabl employee is being sued by the company for allegedly selling fake shares in the company to investors.

A scam coming from an actual employee sounds extremely convincing. It would be as if the Nigerian prince low on cash emails you from an @NigerianPrince.com address. Tough to know it’s a fraud, and the scammer was able to dupe 10 investors.

Here’s what we know:

• Yanni Tassev was a former Boxabl employee, with an official title of ‘Efficiency Specialist’

• Tassev allegedly told potential investors that he owned a significant amount of Boxabl shares that he could sell to them at a heavily discounted price

• Tassev did not own shares like he mentioned, but instructed the investors to wire funds to a bank account - his own.

• Tassev managed to wrangle over $1M from 10 unassuming investors.

• Boxabl became aware of the ruse after one of the investors informed them of the stock transfer. Boxabl claims to have solicited a full confession from Tassev and contacted the FBI to ensure proper procedure took place

• It’s rumored that Tassev has fled the country. Prior to his Instagram being taken down, some had reported that he was seen posting on the social network from Bulgaria

• The Boxabl lawsuit attempts to claw back some of the stolen funds and restrain Tassev from spilling company secrets and bad-mouthing the company

Be careful out there, make sure you are using official portals to make your investments!

Blink and you’ll miss it → here are three AI updates that all happened in the last 7 days:

• Someone used AI to generate a fake image of an explosion taking place by the Pentagon in an attempt to tank the stock market. Several news outlets got duped, and the scheme kinda worked 

• Adobe Photoshop releases ‘Generative Fill’. The tool alters selected areas of images based on text prompts. The demo is really neat - see it here.

• Nvidia adds $200B in market cap after announcing an extremely upbeat quarter - their GPU units are poised to power the AI gold rush

  • For context, there are only 52 companies in the world worth more than $200B!

A lot can change in 30 days…

Unbanked was a new bank that bridged the gap between crypto and traditional currency.

In April they won StartEngine’s pitch competition, received an investment from Kingscrowd Capital, and were rated a ‘top deal’ by Kingscrowd’s analysts.

30 days later, the business is closing up shop.

Unbanked was funded by 6,000 retail investors who poured $4M into the company. Unfortunately for them, this will most likely result in a 100% loss of their investment.

To read more about this situation, read our writeup here.

Please note that this is not financial advice, nor a recommendation to invest in any of the startups mentioned. Readers should conduct their own due diligence and understand that startup investing is a risky asset class.