Similar to the debate over whether it was ethical of Reddit to seed themselves with sock puppets.
"I contracted some people specifically to pretend to be employees so that someone else would be deceived into thinking they were employees. But somehow it's still not my fault that this person was deceived."
Seems like a weak defense.
Are you really so certain that we'd be better off otherwise?
Is it surprising that people who lie and cheat sometimes obtain an advantage by doing so? Again, no.
But yes, I do think we would be better off without people lying and cheating.
IANAL and I do not claim that the law was necessarily broken in this instance, but the intent was clearly to deceive a business partner in order to obtain a financial advantage. I mean just look at SA's own words here:
> So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were
The deceptive intent is explicit in his own description of events. It's honestly quite silly that you are looking for some semantic get-out clause here when SA's own statement is so explicit.