Nate app founder Albert Saniger claimed his shopping bot was 93 to 97 percent automated by AI, when the real figure was reportedly closer to zero, with actual orders allegedly processed by humans typing behind the scenes. On this episode of Vaporware, Derek and Grant use that case as a launchpad to ask a bigger question: is Nate a one-off con, or the first documented instance of a repeatable AI fraud playbook?

The hosts build out a three-part taxonomy of AI fraud, unpack Cluely CEO Roy Lee's public admission that his viral $7 million ARR figure was inflated by roughly 35 percent ahead of a $15 million funding round, and break down the specific accounting tricks used to dress up thin numbers as explosive growth. They also dig into the SEC's new Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit and why regulators tend to show up only after investors have already lost money.

Next episode, the hosts follow the money further, asking whether AI companies can even afford to charge what their products actually cost to run.

A 57-year-old from Mooresville, North Carolina allegedly walked away with 239 million shares of a $12.25 billion company without paying a single dollar. In this episode, Derek and Grant break down how Charles Cole used a fake Malaysian bank website, forged documents, and a years-long confidence game to convince Infinite Reality — the Florida XR startup that acquired Napster for $207 million — that he controlled $3.36 billion in ready capital. The episode covers how Cole's phantom investment directly enabled the Napster acquisition to close, why the press ran a major funding announcement without ever naming the investor, and how a Forbes journalist caught the fraud before the company's own executives did. The DOJ unsealed its indictment on June 11, 2026, charging Cole with wire fraud and securities fraud. When the con finally collapsed, 700 shareholders were on a Zoom call being told the money had simply never existed. This story isn't just about one fraudster — it's about what happens when a company needs a big number badly enough to stop asking obvious questions.

SpaceX just completed the largest IPO in history — $75 billion raised, $1.77 trillion valuation — and the S-1 filing behind it prompted one analyst to call it "unserious, empty, hallucinatory, and borderline dishonest." Derek and Grant pull apart how a genuinely operational rocket company built a pitch that claims a $28.5 trillion addressable market, with $26.5 trillion of it coming from AI businesses SpaceX does not currently run — and the AI segment itself lost $6.4 billion last year. The episode covers the February 2026 xAI merger mechanics that flipped a profitable rocket business into a single-quarter $4.28 billion loss, the $100 billion shadow market of pre-IPO secondary shares where some buyers may have purchased nothing at all, and why real rockets make the speculative valuation more dangerous, not less — because operational credibility launders claims the numbers can't support. The first insider lockup unlock arrives around August, and the pattern looks familiar to anyone who remembers the last time a compelling story outran the math.

Joseph Sanberg co-founded Aspiration Partners in 2013, raised hundreds of millions from celebrities and institutional investors, and spent five years secretly paying fake customers to make his green neobank look real. In this episode of Vaporware, Derek and Grant trace the full arc of the Aspiration fraud — from the ESG-wrapped pitch that attracted Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr., and a $60 million check from Steve Ballmer, to the circular payment scheme that inflated revenues by roughly $44 million in a single year, to the forged documents that secured $145 million in loans backed by fabricated net-worth statements. The episode breaks down why sophisticated investors missed every warning sign, how KPMG's resignation letter explicitly flagged fraud while the $2.3 billion SPAC was still open, and what Judge Stephen Wilson meant when he called this case among the worst he had seen in more than four decades on the bench. The same pattern — mission-driven branding that turns emotional investment into a due diligence blind spot — keeps appearing across ESG, AI, and crypto, and that is exactly where Vaporware is headed next.

Do Kwon promised the world a self-sustaining stablecoin and a guaranteed 20% annual yield — and convinced enough people to put roughly $40 billion on the line before it all collapsed in under a week.

In this episode, Derek and Grant trace the full arc of the Terra-Luna fraud: how Kwon built a cult following around an algorithmic peg that was secretly propped up by a trading firm, why the Anchor Protocol's headline yield was quietly subsidized by Terraform Labs itself, and how fabricated adoption metrics kept the story alive long after insiders knew it was unsound. From the Interpol Red Notice to a forged passport on a Montenegro tarmac, the chase is as extraordinary as the collapse. Sentenced to 15 years in December 2025, Kwon joins a growing list of founders who borrowed Silicon Valley's language of inevitability to dodge scrutiny until retail investors had nothing left. The pattern — algorithmic certainty promised, accountability deferred, losses socialized — is not unique to crypto, and it will not end here.

Before there was AI, there was a man in a box — and the con has barely changed since 1770. This episode traces the fraud behind Nate, the AI checkout app that raised over $50 million from top venture firms while running on hundreds of human contractors in the Philippines completing every transaction by hand. Derek and Grant walk through how founder Albert Saniger built the pitch, staged the investor demos, and suppressed an internal dashboard that proved the automation rate was effectively zero from day one. Along the way, they connect the case to Wolfgang von Kempelen's 18th-century chess automaton, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and a parallel modern case involving a literal human hidden inside a fast food robot. The DOJ and SEC filed charges against Saniger in April 2025; as of mid-2025, he was living in Barcelona and had still not been served. The entire scheme unraveled not because of investor oversight or regulatory monitoring, but because one journalist asked a hard question — which may say more about the current state of AI enforcement than any of the individual facts of the case.

Albert Saniger raised $51 million for Nate, an AI-powered shopping app, while prosecutors say the actual automation rate was effectively zero percent.

In this episode, Derek and Grant trace the full arc of the Nate fraud: how Saniger allegedly staged investor demos using human contractors in the Philippines, fabricated automation rates as high as 97 percent in SEC filings, and quietly cashed out $3 million of his own shares during the company's largest funding round. They cover the infrastructure built to hide the operation — a locked internal dashboard, silenced workers, and a backup call center in Romania stood up after a typhoon disrupted the Manila team. The episode also examines how a single investigative article in 2022 accomplished what years of VC due diligence never did, and what the parallel criminal and civil charges filed in April 2025 signal about how regulators are approaching AI-washing claims. Nate was not an isolated case — Presto Automation and EvenUp followed the same playbook, raising the question of whether AI-powered has become a label investors fund rather than a capability anyone verifies.