New day, new scam.

Mr Founder, we're going to call him that but you can easily find his name on Google, founded a social media app called IRL, which ironically stands for In Real Life.

The app was supposed to be a blend of Eventbrite, Facebook and Couchsurfing. Sort of. Kinda like an online app to facilitate offline events.

Mr Founder claimed his app had 20+ million users, which led to a huge investment round led by prominent investors and banks.

Mr Founder received $170+ million in funding and, at one point, the startup became a unicorn after reaching a value of $1.2 billion.

For reference, unicorn is a term used in the corporate world to refer to a startup that goes from 0 to a nine-figure valuation.

Everything went well, until it all went wrong.

First, IRL got investigated by the SEC. Second, the company fired 25% of its workforce. Third, after repeated reports courtesy of a tech mag called The Informer, investors eventually decided to do something they maybe hadn't done: due diligence.

An internal investigation revealed that nearly 96% of the app's users were bots.

My only question is, shouldn't they have done it like, before throwing $200m at the app?