A publicity shot published by the BBC for Lucy Williamson’s report inside Al-Shifa Hospital in November 2023. (Photo: BBC)
In May 2024, the website of ad-tech firm Kubient touted that the company was "a perfect blend" of ad veterans and developers, "committed to solving the growing problem of fraud" in digital ads. Like many corporate sites, it also linked old blog posts from its home page, including a May 2022 post on "How to create a world free of fraud: Kubient's secret sauce."
These days, Kubient's website cannot be reached, the team is no more, and CEO Paul Roberts is due to serve one year and one day in prison, having pled guilty Thursday to creating his own small world of fraud. Roberts, according to federal prosecutors, schemed to create $1.3 million in fraudulent revenue statements to bolster Kubient's initial public offering (IPO) and significantly oversold "KAI," Kubient's artificial intelligence tool.
The core of the case is an I-pay-you, you-pay-me gambit that Roberts initiated with an unnamed "Company-1," according to prosecutors. Kubient and this firm would each bill the other for nearly identical amounts, with Kubient purportedly deploying KAI to find instances of ad fraud in the other company's ad spend.
Roberts, prosecutors said, "directed Kubient employees to generate fake KAI reports based on made-up metrics and no underlying data at all." These fake reports helped sell the story to independent auditors and book the synthetic revenue in financial statements, according to Roberts' indictment.
Before Kubient's IPO in August 2020, Kubient issued a prospectus noting research figures that suggested $42 billion lost to ad fraud in 2019. Kubient's technology was touted as fast enough to work in the 300-millisecond real-time ad auction window. It leveraged "machine learning powered [sic] pre-bid ad fraud prevention technology" and a "self-learning neural network always getting smarter."
Revenues for the first quarter of 2020 were shown as $1.38 million, a huge jump from $177,635 in Q1 2019, thanks to "two enterprise customers" that "successfully beta tested KAI." Prosecutors noted at the time of Roberts' plea that he personally added language that Kubient was "identifying and preventing approximately 300% more digital ad fraud" than a client's current ad partners. Kubient raised more than $33 million during its initial and secondary equity offerings.
Investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, US Postal Inspection Service, and the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York led to charges against Roberts in September 2024. Joshua A. Weiss, Kubient's former chief financial officer, and Grainne M. Coen, a former audit committee chair, were also charged at the time.
Roberts, 48, faced up to 20 years in prison on a single charge of securities fraud. He will be subject to one year of post-release supervision after serving his term.
Kubient, which was reported to be in Chapter 7 liquidation proceedings at the time of Roberts' plea, was announced as merging with Adomni and taking on the Adomni name in May 2023.
