I think the shenanigans they were pulling (crazy governance, conflicts of interest enriching the founder and wife, bad acquisitions) were obvious to the HN and analyst community, but possibly they hoped it would be over the heads of retail investors.

Now obviously, in this case, it was too blatant and stunk bad enough that even retail investors shied away.

Isn't the most basic fraud to advertise fraud? My Google fu fails me, but in general I seem to recall the absolute most common con is to "recruit" people for a made up con (essentially: if you give me 1k we can defraud this mark for 100k and share the profit (the con obviously being that your partner simply pockets the 1k))?

> In order for something to be fraud there has to be deception.

Not "fraud" in technical sense; more like "generous marketing".

Running an ad of a bunch of thin, attractive people drinking Coke is not fraud. It's also not very accurate either.

If SoftBank had to do creative accounting to value it at $47 billion in January in order to support the IPO price (and thus increase the value of their existing investment) then that might be fraud. I haven't seen anybody suggest that such evidence exists though.

Whether there was deception and therefore fraud will likely be determined in a court of law, by a jury.

Masquerading as a tech company is deception. Pumping up valuation is deception.