That doesn’t really sound like “being ripped off,” as opposed to “betting on a lame horse.”

The people behind this were irresponsible, childish, and exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect. They weren’t really hardline crooks. Crooks are probably a lot more organized.

I have gotten myself invested with similar crowds. There’s usually a charismatic spokesperson, leading the chaos.

They likely didn’t plan to rip him off, but paying him wasn’t really something they thought about. Real crooks put lots of planning into taking money.

> Multiple very junior developers were touching (binary, TouchDesigner) code and deploying straight to production via thumb drive, with zero version control. In fact, they didn’t know what version control was.

I suspect many startups fit that description. If they survive, then they usually pull themselves up by the bootstraps, eventually. Many of them collapse, taking everything with them.