A tech CEO who lied to investors to get funding and then blew millions of it on maintaining a luxury lifestyle, which included private jets and top seats at sporting events, has been sentenced to just over eight years in prison.

Daniel Boice, 41, set up what he claimed would be the “Uber of private investigators,” called Trustify, in 2015. He managed to pull in over $18m in funding from a range of investors by lying about how successful the business was.

According to the criminal indictment [PDF] against him, investors received detailed financial statements that claimed Trustify was pulling in $500,000 a month and had hundreds of business relationships that didn’t exist. Boice also emailed, called, and texted potential investors claiming the same. But, prosecutors say, the truth was that the biz was making “significantly less” and the documentation was all fake.

The tech upstart started to collapse in November 2018 when losses mounted to the point where Boice was unable to pay his staff. When they complained, he grew angry, fired them, and cut off all company email and instant messaging accounts, they allege in a separate lawsuit [PDF] demanding unpaid wages.

Even as Trustify was being evicted from its office, however, Boice continued to lie to investors, claiming he had $18m in the bank when accounts show he had less than $10,000. Finally in 2019 the company was placed into corporate receivership, leading to over $18m in losses to investors and over $250,000 in unpaid wages.

As well as creating false income and revenue documents, Boice was found to have faked an email from one large investor saying that it was going to invest $7.5m in the business that same day – and then forwarded it to another investor as proof of interest. That investor then sank nearly $2m into the business.

Profligate

While the business was failing, however, Boice used millions invested in it to fund his own lifestyle. He put down deposits on two homes in the US – a $1.6m house in Virginia and a $1m beach house in New Jersey – using company funds. He also paid for a chauffeur, house manager, and numerous other personal expenses with Trustify cash. More money was spent on holidays, a $83,000 private jet flight to Vermont, and over $100,000 was spent on seats at various sporting events. His former employees also allege in a separate lawsuit that he spent $600,000 on a documentary about him and his wife.

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Source: Trustify CEO gets eight years for lying to investors, spending millions on homes, private jets, sports tickets

Let’s say you’re an up-and-coming streamer. You’ve done it for a while and you make decent money, although you’re no Tyler “Ninja” Blevins. But you’re on your way there, or so you hope. A while back, you got the opportunity to sign with an agency that promised to help you set up deals to advertise brands on your streams. Today, that’s finally paying off. The agency calls you to offer a $10,000 deal. You don’t think twice. That’s a handsome chunk of change. Time to pop a bottle of champagne and celebrate. There’s just one problem. Turns out the agency pocketed $90,000.

The above hypothetical scenario is based on a true story told by former CEO of esports organization CLG and current CMO of streaming company N3rdfusion Devin Nash, who opted to keep the streamer and agency’s identities anonymous. According to Nash’s story, which echoes others that Kotaku heard in the course of reporting, the initial deal was $100,000 for a single streamer to represent a big brand. But the agency was in full control of negotiations, so it just conveniently omitted the part about the remaining $90,000, because hey, $10,000 sounds pretty good in isolation, right? So the agency drew up a limited partnership agreement, and that was that. Nash went on to tell Kotaku that the streamer didn’t even get to keep the full $10,000.

“[The agency] also took the ten percent they had contractually,” Nash said in a Discord voice call. “So they took $1,000 and also pocketed the $90,000. They made $91,000, the streamer made $9,000, and nobody was the wiser.”

Streaming is big business now, and that means big money. But it also means that the world of streaming is transforming, and streamers are having to learn on the fly how to do more than just entertain. They’re having to strike deals with companies, agencies, and now entire platforms. Toward the end of last year, the deals grew bigger than ever, with blue-haired Fortnite megastar Tyler “Ninja” Blevins jumping ship from Twitch to Microsoft-owned streaming platform Mixer in a high-profile exclusivity deal that was soon followed by countless others. The business of video game streaming is rapidly evolving into something that echoes Hollywood, with agents and managers negotiating on behalf of streamers who are increasingly treated like actors or TV shows, and who wind up on platforms that stand in for more traditional networks.

Source: Top Streamers Are Leaving Twitch Amidst Big Money And Shady Deals

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