Venture Fraud

We thank Jessica Bai, Michael Ewens, Minmo Gahng, Thomas Hellmann, Simi Kedia, Ramana Nanda, Ludovic Phalippou, Jay Ritter, Morten Sorensen, Tracy Wang, Emmanuel Yimfor, and seminar participants at the ASU Sonoran Winter Finance Conference, U of Kentucky Finance Conference, FIRS, U of Delaware Corporate Governance Symposium, UT Austin Forensic Finance Conference, Bretton Woods Accounting and Finance Conference, HEC Paris Entrepreneurship Workshop, IPC Spring Research Symposium, HBS, University of Toronto, UCSF, Western University, and Auburn University for helpful comments. We also thank our research assistants Aman Aggarwal, Eric Au-Yeung, Noémie Bucourt, Maryann Chen, Limu Cui, Peter Guo, Mariya Grynevych, Jiecheng Huang, Weixuan Jiang, Ting-Hsuan Kung, Gary Liang, Nivedha Madhivanan, Fiona Trepanier, and Lingyi Zhou. Funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Management Analytics Research Cluster is gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• February 18, 2026