Today: Max Polyakov's grift empire, the conservative dating app "The Right Stuff," and a doctored photo of Michelle Obama
How Max Polyakov Hides His Financial Interest in an International Web of Online Deception
Max Polyakov is a British-Ukrainian IT entrepreneur who co-founded, and until recently majority-owned, the Texas-based rocket company and U.S. government contractor Firefly Aerospace. Like so many in technology whose fortunes are tied to early internet marketing and e-commerce, Polyakov has for nearly a decade cast himself as a Ukrainian version of Elon Musk — a “visionary” whose vast wealth benefits the whole of humanity, in part because it goes toward launching his rockets into space.
What this series reveals is a global network of shell companies tied to Polyakov or his associates that work in concert to enroll people into recurring credit card subscriptions to deceptive or effectively fake services.
See what reporter Alex Kasprak revealed in part II of this special Snopes investigation. |
