The investment firm’s representative met the artificial intelligence startup’s CEO at a bank in San Francisco’s Chinatown last June, expecting to receive a statement directly from the bank showing how much the startup, chatbot company GameOn, had in its accounts.
The investment company had put $5.7 million into GameOn in 2021. The representative — a Game On board member — got the statement, showing a healthy $13.4 million balance.
But according to claims in a federal fraud indictment this week against GameOn CEO and co-founder Alexander Beckman and his wife Valerie Lau Beckman, all was not as it seemed. To start, the bank balance was $25.93. Mrs. Beckman had gone to the bank, emailed the fake statement to a bank employee, and asked the worker to put it in the envelope for her husband to pick up, the indictment alleged.
While most of the couple’s fraudulent behavior alleged by federal prosecutors took the form of purportedly falsified financial statements and pilfered identities, the episode at the bank involved an on-the-ground gambit that appeared — at first — to work, the indictment filed Tuesday claimed.
The investor’s representative “believed the statement was real and shared pictures of it with other members of GameOn’s board,” the indictment said.
That afternoon last June was the culmination of a years-long fraud by the pair that cost investors and the company more than $60 million, some of which was used by the Beckmans to buy homes, luxury cars, and jewelry, and to pay private schools attended by Mr. Beckman’s children, the indictment in San Francisco U.S. District Court alleged.
The couple were arrested Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice said. A lawyer for Mr. Beckman did not respond to requests for comment. Mrs. Beckman could not be reached.
GameOn, a San Francisco company launched in 2014, served customers including American professional sports teams, leagues and associations, as well as prominent fashion and retail brands, the indictment said. Its product was an AI chatbot intended to engage with its clients’ fans, customers and consumers. Which teams and leagues were clients is not specified in the indictment.
However, the Los Angeles Chargers National Football League team in 2020 announced it was using GameOn’s chatbot. Posts by GameOn on social media platform X and company press releases tout partnerships with the New York Yankees Major League Baseball team, the Las Vegas Raiders and Jacksonville Jaguars NFL teams, the Detroit Pistons of the National Basketball Association, the Las Vegas Aces and Chicago Sky of the Women’s National Basketball Association, United Kingdom soccer titan Arsenal, and the mixed-martial-arts Professional Fighters League. GameOn press releases also claimed partnerships with luxury brands Valentino and Armani.
No wrongdoing is alleged against GameOn clients.
The indictment describes an enterprise constantly teetering on the edge of failure as the Beckmans allegedly solicited and obtained investments via false financial documents that dramatically overstated company sales, profit and bank balances.
“GameOn depended on new investor funds to operate, burned through its funds, received overdraft notices from banks, was delinquent in paying certain customers, and often was on the brink of not having enough money in the bank to operate and make payroll,” the indictment claimed.
The investment firm whose representative went to the bank that day was one of four such firms — two in San Francisco, two in New York — allegedly scammed by the Beckmans. The two other purported fraud victims were individuals from northern California.
The firm — identified as “Investor 1” in the indictment — in April 2021 received an email from Mrs. Beckman with a table showing $4 million in sales and $1.9 million in profit for that month, but sales for that entire year never topped $1 million, the indictment claimed. The investment firm sent GameOn $2.5 million three days later, the indictment said.
The following month, Mrs. Beckman sent the firm a spreadsheet from Mr. Beckman indicating GameOn had close to $9 million in two banks, when in reality it had a negative balance at one of the banks and $2,350 in the other. After Mrs. Beckman followed up in September with allegedly inflated sales and profit numbers, the investment company sent another $3.2 million, the indictment claimed.
Similar transactions followed the same pattern, with GameOn claiming to one investor it made $72.4 million in sales and $56.8 million in profits from January through September 2023, when the company turned less than $1 million in profit that whole year, the indictment alleged.
To distribute false information to investors, Beckman created fake email addresses for real GameOn workers: a contractor, a consultant, and a part-time chief financial officer, the indictment claimed. He also allegedly “fabricated two GameOn audit reports using the names, signatures, and trademarks of reputable accounting firms,” the indictment said.
The couple used $4.2 million in ill-gotten gains to buy a property in San Francisco — in posh Presidio Heights, court records indicate — and put another $360,000 of investors’ money toward another home in the city, the indictment claimed. Hundreds of thousands each went to the private school, a social club where the Beckmans married in November 2023, and more than $100,000 went to pay personal property taxes, the indictment claimed.
Tech website VentureBeat reported in July 2024 that Beckman resigned from GameOn early that month, days after a probe by the startup’s board found that a bank account that should have had $11 million in it had only 37 cents.
The Beckmans, both granted bail Thursday for $1 million each according to court records, could face years in prison if convicted.
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