Authority Magazine
Paul Roberts, former CEO of the extinct Kubient
Paul Roberts, executive director of an AI advertising technology company that promised to solve the “growing problem of fraud” in online advertising, was convicted of a fraudulent accounting scheme.
In May 2024, the ad technology company website Kubient He announced that the company was “a perfect mix” of veterans and ad programmers, “committed to solving the growing problem of fraud” in digital ads.
Like many business sites, it also linked old blog posts from its homepage, including a May 2022 post about “how to create a fraud free world: Kubient’s secret ingredient“.
Founded in 2017, the company specializes in programmatic advertising platforms and fraud detection.
Currently, the Kubient website is inaccessible, the team no longer exists and the executive director Paul Roberts is expected to fulfill a year and a day in prisonafter declared guilty on Thursday of creating his own small world of fraud, note a.
Roberts, 48, could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison for a single accusation of securities fraud.
According to the process by federal prosecutors, the CEO planned to create $ 1.3 million in fraudulent revenue statements to reinforce the company’s IPO – its initial public offering on the stock market – and overvalued significantly Artificial Intelligence Tool “Kai” Da Kubient.
The core of the case is a “I pay you, you pay me” play that Roberts started with a unidentified satellite companyaccording to the prosecutors.
To Kubient e this company would earn one another almost identical amountswith Kubient using Kai to find cases of fraud in advertising spending from the other company.
According to the prosecutor, Roberts “gave instructions to Kubient employees to Create fake Kai reports based on invented metrics and without any underlying data ”.
These false reports helped sell history to independent auditors and registering synthetic revenues in the financial statements, according to Roberts’ accusation.
Before the company’s IPO, in August 2020, Kubient had presented a report with data that pointed out that it had been during 2019 a loss of 42 billion dollars in fraud. The following year, Kubient contributed to statistics-gathering it $ 1.3 million.
