The details of your post go beyond those mentioned in the article. Could you provide additional links?

I was someone at the bottom of the totem pole who tried to do my job and ask what questions I could. I certainly noticed a lack of analytics or basic traffic/revenue/customer data. Retroactively, it was obvious that this was essentially a fake job, but I couldn't piece this together and there wasn't enough company-wide transparency.

The fake financial statements were publicly released: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1317641...

How much were you being paid a year to do basically nothing?

Decent salary, but that's not the point. I'm distraught to realize I spent 5 months on nothing, and it's not something I'm proud to have or explain on my CV. It's cruel how much money these people throw away, but we were misled into thinking it was real. I wouldn't have taken this position to support such a scumbag.

What is cruel is I am having to file bankruptcy because of this.

That is super tough and stressing, sorry!

FWIW, I would wait on returning any money (or saying anything at all, really) + talk to a lawyer with experience in bankruptcy (their's + yours).

My guess is you can keep all/most of the $. They were fraudulent to you + the company is now evaporating. Sounds like you still need to pivot, but at least you can do so with $ in the bank and no black marks.

Not sure if you're being serious, but if you were an early investor, isn't it on you to make sure the business is legit? Anyone can be misled by a fraudster, but some responsibility lies with the VCs and angel investors throwing money at these companies and enabling this sort of thing to happen.

No, not an investor. Without giving a way too much, we are a company in the technology space. They paid us a fee per user. They paid us fees based on these fake numbers of users that they submitted to their investors. Which means they essentially over paid us what is a lot of money for our small company. We made business decisions around that money in the past and for the future. Now it looks like that not only will we get no more money, but they also want like 90% of what they paid us back.

Sorry to hear that. I dont know what the contract says, but I would be inclined to lawyer up and tell them to get stuffed RE the repayments.

Were you an investor?

No, not an investor. Without giving a way too much, we are a company in the technology space. They paid us a fee per user. They paid us fees based on these fake numbers of users that they submitted to their investors. Which means they essentially over paid us what is a lot of money for our small company. We made business decisions around that money in the past and for the future. Now it looks like that not only will we get no more money, but they also want like 90% of what they paid us back.

Man/Gal, that sucks! Keep your head up <3