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.”)