I worked in an office next to an Uber clone that was clearly unsuccessful. Yet they had a significant Series A from a Russian oligarch, then got bought a few years later at something like 10x the Series A funding amount by a different Russian oligarch. There was a press release and a news story about how wonderful this was.

This scheme was so clearly a laundering play, but everyone pretended it was some amazing exit. I'm confident the tech industry is full of these shenanigans, but I've never seen anything like this uncovered.