[jacquesm]

Nah, that's 'growth hacking' /s.

Really, yes obviously that's fraud but apparently it's perfectly normal as long as you don't get caught.

Artificially inflating the numbers whilst shopping for investments is definitely not acceptable. Pumping money around is an old trick to inflate the visible size of a company, some of these schemes are surprisingly hard to detect (the one here definitely isn't).

I'm somewhat surprised that there was no oversight in place that would have stopped this, that's serious money.

[ellius]

Yep. Self-dealing is always an enormous red flag for fraud and other shadiness, in financial businesses especially.