An AI Fraud, An Inconvenient Truth
The chatbot did its job—the founder still allegedly had to lie.
Welcome to Black Sheep, a spin-off publication of my serialized memoir. SMIRK. While SMIRK was a deep dive into my unusual personal and professional relationship with one unique white-collar fraudster— Martin Shkreli — Black Sheep takes a broader view and tells the stories of a wider range of business crimes and failures.
This publication will examine cultural themes and motives that contribute to lying, cheating, stealing, and related self-inflicted disasters; the impacts of those events; and the people who play starring roles in these dramas. I find these tales both cautionary and fascinating; I hope you will, too.
A “$60 MILLION Swindle”
Eventually, AI will take our jobs, drive our cars, raise our children, imprison us in the Matrix, and slaughter us with an army of Terminators. But before it can achieve its apocalyptic dreams, it has to do something far more mundane: make money. And much like 35-year-olds living in their parents’ basements, some robots are struggling with that hurdle.
Investors in an AI sports startup called GameOn learned this the hard way—after they sank $60 million into the business, and just before its founder, 41-year-old Alexander Beckman, and his wife, 38-year-old Valerie Lau, were charged with fraud.
When news of the arrests broke in January 2025, coverage zeroed in on the usual themes: the couple’s alleged deception, their fall from San Francisco tech society, and the supposed greed that drove them to fund what journalists called a “lavish lifestyle.” (Given that a starter home in the Bay Area is north of $1 million, the couple’s lifestyle was probably closer to “upper middle class.”)
Beckman allegedly provided wildly inflated sales figures and cash balances to investors over a period of years and even impersonated bank employees to back up his numbers. Lau, an attorney who worked as general counsel for a venture capital firm, allegedly helped fabricate audit reports and deliver falsified documents to banks. Maybe she took the “partner in crime” dating app cliché too literally.
Regardless, public reaction was unsympathetic, as evident in this headline in the British tabloid the Daily Mail:
Here’s what nags at me: Even assuming the prosecutors’ allegations are true, was this really a swindle in the classic sense—an elaborate long con, a bait-and-switch routine? That framing seems ill-fitting.
Because here’s the twist: the product, an AI chatbot, was real. And it worked. It increased fan engagement during live games, providing real-time stats, trivia, and updates. Major league teams used it: the Yankees, the Pistons, the Vikings. It wasn’t vaporware. It wasn’t hype. It just couldn’t make money.
That’s the uncomfortable truth. GameOn built something that functioned and had traction, and it still couldn’t survive. Which raises an even sharper question: If the chatbot worked, why did Beckman need to lie?
The Monetization Trap
The answer isn’t buried in mystery. I asked ChatGPT.
“Great question—and one that touches on some of the real-world challenges of monetizing AI/chatbot tech in niche spaces like sports,” it replied. It then listed a set of plausible issues: a narrow B2B market, over-reliance on a few large contracts, limited upsell potential, dependence on third-party platforms like Facebook Messenger, and difficulty proving ROI.
ChatGPT's most damning point? Teams don’t want to pay much for “fan engagement” tools unless those tools directly generate revenue through ticket sales, merch, or gambling. A chatbot, no matter how clever, doesn’t hit the bottom line. And fans aren’t lining up to pay for it either.
In other words: The bot worked, but the business model didn’t.
Not Built to Last
The tabloid narrative presumes that Beckman set out to defraud investors from the jump. That’s rarely how this goes. Think Elizabeth Holmes. Sam Bankman-Fried. Even Bernie Madoff. Most of them didn’t start out intending to steal—they got trapped in bad math and bad faith and kept doubling down.
Beckman and his wife, Lau, allegedly followed the same road to ruin. On paper and likely in person, Beckman looked the part of a founder at the intersection of media, entertainment, and technology. He had studied film at the University of California-Berkeley and obtained a Master’s in Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. His resume encompassed experience in film production, at an interactive video platform, early-stage investing, and working with big brands like Toyota, Mercedes Benz, McDonald’s, Adidas, ESPN, Fox, and MTV. (Beckman’s LinkedIn profile has been removed, but you can view his experience on TheOrg.com and Entrepreneur.com.)
Perhaps important to venture capitalists, he was also a white dude with a strong jawline (see below).
To develop his own startups, Beckman teamed up with Kalin Stanojev, a product designer/software engineer he’d worked with at the interactive video platform Coincident.tv. The pair first co-founded EVNTLIVE, a virtual venue for live music streaming, which they sold to Yahoo in 2013 for an undisclosed sum. Yahoo shut the platform down and absorbed the talent and tech into its video and media initiatives.
The following year, the two founded GameOn. Like with EVNTLIVE, Beckman served as CEO while Stanojev was chief product officer, overseeing design and engineering. (As of yet, Stanojev has not been charged or publicly accused of any wrongdoing at GameOn.) Around 2016, Lau began doing legal work for GameOn and eventually started dating Beckman. Allegedly, she also began helping cover up his crimes.
The House of Cards
The cracks showed early. According to the indictment, GameOn offered its chatbot as a free pilot, didn’t secure binding contracts, and often charged less than $3,000 a month for usage. In some cases, GameOn actually paid its customers for revenue-sharing agreements that rarely produced any returns. The startup’s revenues never exceeded $1 million in any year, and in most years fell well below $500,000.
The obvious conclusion: teams liked the chatbot, but not enough to pay for it. Beckman, facing pressure to show traction, allegedly began inventing it. He created fake income statements, audits, and bank verifications. When investors asked for third-party validation, he allegedly impersonated CFOs and bank employees via spoofed emails.
Money poured in—$80 million total, $60 million between 2018 and 2024—but GameOn constantly struggled to meet payroll and pay bills. According to prosecutors, Beckman and Lau propped up accounts with personal funds, paid themselves back when new funds arrived, and used credit cards to float operations.
And then the lies got weirder. At one point, Beckman reportedly told investors the company couldn’t access funds due to an “armed robbery” at a bank branch in Menlo Park. Another time, Lau allegedly sent a doctored bank statement showing $13 million in GameOn’s account. The real balance? $25.93.
Venture capitalists expect startups to lose money initially, but they won’t invest without signs of growth and the likelihood of a return. GameOn’s revenue was abysmal, and it showed little improvement after the first few years. To get the cash the company needed to stay afloat, Beckman allegedly took matters into his own hands. The indictment alleged:
From at least in or about September 2018 through his resignation from GameOn in or about July 2024, Beckman served as the primary point of contact for new and existing GameOn investors and its board of directors, and Beckman controlled and understood the financial information for GameOn that he shared with investors.
According to the indictment, “money sometimes was transferred to GameOn when the company needed money” for expenses and “flowed from GameOn back to these individuals after new funds from GameOn investors arrived.” (Not unlike a Ponzi scheme.) Prosecutors also alleged that GameOn expenses were covered by personal credit cards, and the credit card bills were paid as soon as new investor money arrived.
Partners In Crime
Beckman allegedly shared the true picture of the company’s finances with only one other person: Lau. There are no details in the indictment about how this arrangement began and whether it complicated, or maybe enhanced, their budding romance. Taking a wild stab, I will guess it probably did both. Regardless, based on the description of how they worked together to create, spread, and maintain lies, the term “conspiracy” seems especially apt.
Beginning in at least 2021, Lau allegedly engaged in a range of illicit duties on her love interset’s behalf, including temporarily sending $86,250 from her bank account to the company to artificially prop up its cash balance; sending fake financial information to investors and at least one bank; and helping Beckman generate fabricated audit statements using real audit reports of startups she had pulled from her employer’s (a VC firm’s) files.
One of these audit reports, for the year ending in December 2022, stated that gross sales for the year were “approximately $68.6 million,” when both Beckman and Lau “knew that GameOn’s gross sales or revenue for the period was less than $1,000,000,” according to the indictment.
Perhaps hoping that San Francisco’s real estate market appreciation would save them, Beckman and Lau allegedly took $4.2 million from the company and bought multiple homes in the city. Then, according to the indictment, they immediately sought to take out a loan against the properties to pay back the company. Beckman allegedly told a bank employee: “We are going to need to move 4.25 from our GameOn account in our private account and then start the work on the most aggressive io [interest only] loan we can have from you!!”
The couple also allegedly took an unspecified amount of additional funds from the company “for their own personal benefit,” including to pay for private school for Beckman’s children, to pay for “luxury vehicles, personal property taxes,” and “private club memberships,” and for expenses associated with their 2023 wedding.
Scheme Unravels
There is only so much lying you can do before the story starts to wear thin, especially when the people you’re lying to want to know what you’re doing with their money. Starting in 2024, GameOn investors and board members allegedly got increasingly skeptical of Beckman as the company continually had weird hiccups in payroll and other cash-flow problems.
Under pressure to show GameOn had healthy cash reserves, Beckman began using fake email addresses to impersonate bank employees and other third parties to reassure staff and investors. He allegedly offered increasingly absurd justifications for why funds couldn’t be accessed on demand, ranging from early withdrawal penalties to investigations into rogue bank staff to, at one point, a fictional armed robbery in Menlo Park.
Unsurprisingly, the investors’ concerns only increased. Allegedly, Beckman recruited Lau to help bolster his lies. In June 2024, GameOn’s board demanded real-time proof of the company’s bank balance. According to the indictment, Lau supplied that proof by planting a fake bank statement.
By July 2024, the problems with the company were making their way into the press. Technology news site VentureBeat published an account of Beckman resigning “under pressure,” staff being laid off, and $11 million going “missing” from a bank account. The news quickly spread through the VC community.
Lau’s employer at the time, a venture capital firm, confronted her in August about her involvement with GameOn. According to the indictment, she first denied she had done anything for the company, and then attempted to delete hundreds of files after being asked to turn over a work laptop. Those files included fake invoices, bank statements, and internal communications tied to the alleged fraud. She wasn’t successful and ended up charged with obstruction of justice in addition to other crimes.
It was only a matter of time before all of the alleged deceptions and details of the scheme made their way to the US attorney’s office. Beckman, once the face of an exciting tech venture, became yet another poster boy for fraud.
Greatness “Around The Corner”
Hindsight being 20/20, it’s fascinating to look back at how Beckman discussed GameOn in the years before the alleged scheme collapsed. A media brand called FUTRSPRT, which allegedly also backed GameOn, published an interview with Beckman in 2019 describing his ambitions for the company.
He told the interviewer:
We wanted to make sure the fan is in control to get the highlights they want and be able to chat with their buddies in real time. GameOn started as a sports company but we thought chatbots were fun.
We realized we wanted to provide [a] personalized content experience by taking real-time data, associating it with media, and gamifying it.
Asked what the “utopian scenario” would be for GameOn, Beckman replied:
Continue to feel like we’re right around the corner of something great but not being complacent. Invest in ways that will make this the preferred way to watch sports.
So much for utopia.