[yabbadabbadoo]

Reason for including YC in this nonsense:

The YCFunds share common management and are venture capital funds invested in a number of unlicensed money transmitters.

Can that really hold up? Can an investor be held liable for the decisions of a company they invested in? By that logic, what's to stop someone from suing Facebook shareholders?

[wmf]

The whole reason for this mess is that VCs refused to invest in his "legal" startup (didn't want to waste money on compliance costs?) and invested in a bunch of "illegal" competing companies instead.

[jacoblyles]

It's regulated by criminal law, not civil code. The complaint quotes the law:

"Whoever knowingly conducts,controls, manages, supervises, directs, or owns all or part of an unlicensed money transmitting business, shall be fined in accordance with this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both."

[kevingadd]

Presumably if individual Facebook shareholders had real influence over Facebook's actions you could sue them. I would guess the justification here is that YC's partners/etc have a real, tangible influence on the companies they invest in so they do bear some share of the responsibility.