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from the and-she-would-have-gotten-away-with-it-if-it-hadn't-been-for-.... dept.
Submitted via IRC for AnonymousCoward
This story about a billion dollar scam to build an undersea Arctic cable is wild
Last year, the CEO of Quintillion, an Alaskan company trying to build a trans-Arctic undersea cable, was charged with wire fraud after forging contracts to help raise more than $250 million from investors. This week, Bloomberg posted a captivating feature about how that CEO nearly pulled off the scam of a lifetime. It's a fascinating story of how someone tried to fake it 'til they almost made it — but also a cautionary tale about big ambitions can push people to make disastrous decisions.
Elizabeth Pierce apparently had huge ambitions to build an undersea cable to give Alaskans (and eventually, parts of Japan, the Pacific Northwest, Greenland, Iceland, and London) better internet access. It was a noble cause. Internet for much of rural Alaska is slow and depends on expensive satellites, and an undersea cable could bring much faster speeds at cheaper prices for consumers. (Undersea cables are also being explored by big tech companies. Microsoft and Facebook jointly own a 4,000 mile transatlantic cable, and Google has invested in some as well.)
To get investors to back the project, Pierce needed to prove that she had completed contracts that would guarantee some revenue. So, to show investors that the business was solvent, she went right ahead and forged signatures on contracts that, if they'd been legit, would have been worth more than a billion dollars in total.
(Score: 2) by hwertz on Tuesday October 15 2019, @04:53PM
"Another female CEO scams investors who are so busy virtue signalling they forget to do proper due diligence because OMG female CEO."
Not at all. Astoundingly, the article neglects to mention she was a former executive at ACS (Alaska Communications Systems.) ACS ran a 3G (1X+EVDO) cellular network, landline internet and home phone, and even some -- yes -- underwater fiber optic cables. The wireless network was bought by GCI, another Alaska cellular/internet/phone/etc. provider, a few years back. (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mo and VZW had either no service or maybe 1 license saver site in Fairbanks, back then, thus these multiple local cell cos.)
Due diligence would indicate she was an executive at a successful telecom company, who even laid fiber optic links, and left when the wireless network was sold to another cell co. Just the right credentials for a fiber optic cable.