Here is an incredible story about Ozy, a digital media startup. Ozy was looking to raise a $40 million investment from Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s asset management arm, on the strength of the traffic to its website, newsletters and YouTube videos, and of its “charismatic chief executive” Carlos Watson. As part of its due diligence, Goldman wanted to do a call with YouTube, so Ozy set a call between Goldman and YouTube executive Alex Piper in early February.
On the call, Piper said nice things about Ozy, but “the man’s voice began to sound strange to the Goldman Sachs team, as though it might have been digitally altered.” So Goldman “reached out to Mr. Piper, not through the Gmail address that was provided to participants before the meeting, but through Mr. Piper’s assistant at YouTube.” And it turned out he had not been on the call: Samir Rao, Ozy’s co-founder and chief operating officer, had allegedly been impersonating him in order to trick Goldman into investing in Ozy.
