I think he was one of the first to realize that you could take regular YouTube videos that are several minutes long and turn them into skippable pre-roll ads, and some people would watch the whole thing. I know nothing else about him and I hope to keep it that way.
> For example, to entice individuals to invest in their acquisitions, they said their portfolio companies were "on fire" and that "cash flow is strong."
I find it difficult not to do at least a little bit of victim blaming here...
If you mean just a "dating site where all female profiles are fake, generated by site itself", then well, it's just called a "dating site". Whole dating sites industry - with hundreds if not thousands of companies, downstream industries providing them traffic, payments, and services of all kinds, industry associations, conferences, rich networking and whatnot - is doing just that. Always did. The few "real" dating apps/sites like Tinder are just a tip of the iceberg - no one tries to really imitate them - it's not possible.
Almost everything viable on the Internet today, is a "scam" in this (to my taste, extremely strict and old-fashioned, definition). Just because all available real attention has already been harvested a long time ago, and cost of traffic, which is extremely high now because extensive way of attracting it - by having people spend more time at the screen - is no longer available as people already spend glued to the screens all day - so every time to have them visit your site you have to pay more than the other guy pays to have them visit theirs - it's an auction and prices are through the roof.
Thus, if you sell people something which isn't fake, you aren't going to turn a profit. So all who did, are out of business - with the exception of yes, "big tech" monopolies that can exploit the shit out of people in a way no run of the mill scammer like those two poor hapless chaps can even dream of.
Why do you think you need AI for this? You don't even need Indians for this, Americans will do it. I remember someone showing me a site a couple years ago that recruited for the job, and there was a Reddit where they talked about working it and how the rates paid were changing.
Governments have essentially never looked into it, despite it having gone on uninhibited for 20+ years and at the scale of billions annually for at least 16+ years.
Until Match bought the industry it was pretty much impossible to launch a dating site with profiles. The industry standard was to post fakes. Real users would then receive stock responses to keep them around until real people showed up. No AI needed. Just a bag of standard emails. Guys are incredibly dumb and ego driven. It’s very easy to get them to think a beautiful stranger is into them.
Creating fake profiles for a dating site is basically what the Reddit founders did to create Reddit. It’s no more ethically compromised than what many YC companies do.
The ones that get labeled as scams are just the ones that executed poorly
There are also many “legitimate” tech companies that don’t make any profit, but balloon their valuation all the way to an IPO or SPAC and then profit off public investors.
So your definition still can’t distinguish between “real” companies and scam companies
They didn't need LLMs to build bots.
Ashley Madison for example was 10 bots for every one real woman or something absurd.
If you need something more sophisticated than basic template based bots (which always worked just fine, your marks are uh, not exactly the most observant people and really really really want to believe the pretty girl likes them), then it is probably still cheaper to run a literal slave operation in some South Asian state than pay per token.
I'm struggling to understand what this means. He put lots of ads on his videos? Or something else.
E.g., I’d go to watch a video of SmarterEveryDay, and Tai Lopez would show up as an ad, telling me all about his Lamborghinis and bookshelves of books he’d never read. And people would just watch the full ad, even after they could’ve skipped (5s).
That was an interesting era of YouTube, for sure.
It's horrifying.
And many houses featured in videos are content houses... (lavish rentals for influencers to have a luxury background for their videos)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_house
https://blog.giggster.com/how-to-rent-a-tiktok-collab-house-...
He later had a $126k lawsuit for unpaid furniture: https://radaronline.com/p/todrick-hall-sued-126000-unpaid-fu...
Yup. It was bad enough 10 years ago, but now... IMHO the despair has gone exponentially worse. On one side, you got big name YouTubers/Twitch/Kick streamers getting absurdly large deals to shill VPNs and supplements of questionable utility and safety, then for young women you got OnlyFans and its various copycats with excesses like Lil Tay making 1 M$ in 24 hours after turning 18 (problematic in itself - it seems like almost every female child/juvie actor has to cope with absolute weirdos doing countdowns to when they "turn legal").
And on the other side you get an entire generation of people who know that they will never even have the chance to own a home even if they work their entire life.
[1] https://www.eonline.com/news/1420720/lil-tay-says-she-made-s...