The article states that, "Even though we knew we’d technically be lying about our security to anyone we sent these policies to for review ... we decided to adopt these policies because we simply didn’t have the bandwidth to rewrite them all manually."
Like no one characterizes it like that, but this is the same business where you can tell a story about hiring a bunch of college friends to pretend to be your employees so a client comes to your "office" and thinks you're a legitimate business. And instead of looking in horror at how casually you'll lie to get business it's seen as scrappy and whimsical.
They probably saw good results with this back when everyone could take a piece of Craiglist's business and make a billion bucks. Now you're just left with the ethos of cheating your way to the top without a real business to attach it to.
FWIW I think the 30u30 to fraud pipeline is overstated. There are 600 people on the American Forbes 30u30 list every year (it's "30 under 30 each year in each of 20 categories"), with 20ish notable instances of fraud, so maybe a quarter percent of the people on the 30u30 list will later become famous for fraud.
All this evidence seems pretty legit. I found this on LinkedIn and came here to post, but noticed it had already been posted. Surprised I didn’t see it on HN front page.
Major red flag with this should have been that their expensive marketing predicated heavily on them being MIT dropouts instead of any expertise in the space
Most people only care about compliance if it stops them from closing a deal. I was at a startup where some enterprise said we needed a SOC 2. The founder talked them out of it by giving them a discount if they'd waive the requirement.
In a way, this may be a good thing for the 'compliance' ecosystem because it will prompt people to actually read the report and check the evidence, as opposed to trusting a badge.
If you read through the report PDFs of affected companies, you'll find a lot of stock wording and phrases that don't even make sense.
> No custom tailoring, no AI guidance, no real automation. Just pre-populated forms that required you to click “save”.
I hate that I've become this cynical, but it's gotten to the point where reading the "no x, no y, just z" construct makes me assume that writing is AI generated (and then I immediately stop caring about reading it)
Notice how none of Delve's affiliates on X are posting anything after that Substack post. Probably their lawyers told them not to say anything further.
What does that tell you about the scam that was unveiled?
This seems like a hit job by a competitor. Really ruthless.
> Two months ago, an email went out to a few hundred Delve clients informing them that Delve had leaked their audit reports, alongside other confidential information, through a Google spreadsheet that was publicly accessible.
Who leaked the audit reports? Who sent this email? Who is taking the time to write this analysis and kill the company?
In my opinion, the majority of the points in the article are no news. A compliance saas that offers templates for policies, all of them do. The AI is a chatbot, well who thought.
I think the main point is the collusion between delve and the auditors. Is the evidence for that clear?
Delve did not even try to fake the reports well. They could have used AI tooling to write somewhat plausible Assertions of Management, but they just dropped in clear form submissions to the reports they provided. Here is an example from Cluely:
> We have prepared the accompanying description of Cluely, Inc., system titled "Cluely is a desktop AI assistant to give you answers in real-time, when you need it." throughout the period June 27, 2025 - September 27, 2025(description), based on the criteria set forth in the Description Criteria DC Section 200 2018 Description Criteria for a Description of a Service Organization’s System in a SOC 2 Report (description criteria).
> The description is intended to provide users with information about the "Cluely is a desktop AI assistant to give you answers in real-time, when you need it." that may be useful when assessing the risks arising from interactions with Cluely, Inc. system, particularly information about the suitability of design and operating effectiveness of Cluely, Inc. controls to meet the criteria related to Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality and Privacy set forth in TSP Section 100, 2017 Trust Services Principles and Criteria for Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality and Privacy (applicable trust services criteria).
I mean, just re-read this sentence:
> The description is intended to provide users with information about the "Cluely is a desktop AI assistant to give you answers in real-time, when you need it." that may be useful
It makes no sense at all.
Someone implemented the code to automate this report mill, and didn't think to even smooth it out with an LLM! There was clear intent here.
To imagine that an auditor reviewed and stamped this as a coherent body of work beggars belief.
Cluely did the ChatGPT wrapper to cheat on interviews then sold the customer data to recruiters. The whole company promise is a scam, and useless since we have LLMs.
HockeyStack held contests for people to win cars etc and never delivered. They also lied about having revenues and a product when they had nothing built. Along with Greptile they were doing 7day weeks of unpaid labor from “trial periods”.
I've gone through this process and is this not a failure from the institute that are giving away these certifications for a fee without any due diligence?
intermediaries like delve have only amplified this failure.
it was obvious to anyone who was involved in this industry that, all of this is just security theatre with nothing really to back it up.
We were actually looking at it as well recently (we're using Drata). I was thinking "Cool, this looks like the next cool step forward". The claims didn't sound out of the world in my ears.
Every time an issue like this appears I wonder how many more undiscovered frauds are out there.
Compliance is something that no one ever wants and everybody hates. Not a single founder wakes up in the morning thinking to themselves: "oh I wish I could make my company XYZ-123 compliant!"
Thus providing compliance is really just paying someone to shift responsibility.
The regulator can ask whether you are compliant. You can present certificate from Delve or someone else and that's the end of it.
Here's me founding a company and thinking "Shit I really need to be on ITIL 4 and ISO9000 before I even consider taking this to market", but I guess we move in different circles.
There is a lot of serious allegations in here. But some of these complaints apply to most SOC 2 compliance services. For example: it points out that Delve provides pre-filled documents and encourages you to accept them as is. In my experience that is typical. I have seen companies just rubber stamp pre-created documents that describe IT processes that do not accurately reflect actual policy because the MBA[1] running the project didn't want to pull in IT and had no idea what any of it meant.
[1] No offense to MBA, just using it as a placeholder for: business stakeholder with no IT background.
100 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadHow did none of this come up during diligence? Feels like a prime example of too good to be true.
The article states that, "Even though we knew we’d technically be lying about our security to anyone we sent these policies to for review ... we decided to adopt these policies because we simply didn’t have the bandwidth to rewrite them all manually."
https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2035024494663016532
Like no one characterizes it like that, but this is the same business where you can tell a story about hiring a bunch of college friends to pretend to be your employees so a client comes to your "office" and thinks you're a legitimate business. And instead of looking in horror at how casually you'll lie to get business it's seen as scrappy and whimsical.
I would have expected this to be somewhere at the top right now given how deep the article digs and evidence seems legit.
I guess it is great if you're a grifter/scammer or looking to just sell off to a FANG.
If you read through the report PDFs of affected companies, you'll find a lot of stock wording and phrases that don't even make sense.
I hate that I've become this cynical, but it's gotten to the point where reading the "no x, no y, just z" construct makes me assume that writing is AI generated (and then I immediately stop caring about reading it)
What does that tell you about the scam that was unveiled?
Not good.
> Two months ago, an email went out to a few hundred Delve clients informing them that Delve had leaked their audit reports, alongside other confidential information, through a Google spreadsheet that was publicly accessible.
Who leaked the audit reports? Who sent this email? Who is taking the time to write this analysis and kill the company?
In my opinion, the majority of the points in the article are no news. A compliance saas that offers templates for policies, all of them do. The AI is a chatbot, well who thought.
I think the main point is the collusion between delve and the auditors. Is the evidence for that clear?
> We have prepared the accompanying description of Cluely, Inc., system titled "Cluely is a desktop AI assistant to give you answers in real-time, when you need it." throughout the period June 27, 2025 - September 27, 2025(description), based on the criteria set forth in the Description Criteria DC Section 200 2018 Description Criteria for a Description of a Service Organization’s System in a SOC 2 Report (description criteria).
> The description is intended to provide users with information about the "Cluely is a desktop AI assistant to give you answers in real-time, when you need it." that may be useful when assessing the risks arising from interactions with Cluely, Inc. system, particularly information about the suitability of design and operating effectiveness of Cluely, Inc. controls to meet the criteria related to Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality and Privacy set forth in TSP Section 100, 2017 Trust Services Principles and Criteria for Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality and Privacy (applicable trust services criteria).
I mean, just re-read this sentence:
> The description is intended to provide users with information about the "Cluely is a desktop AI assistant to give you answers in real-time, when you need it." that may be useful
It makes no sense at all.
Someone implemented the code to automate this report mill, and didn't think to even smooth it out with an LLM! There was clear intent here.
To imagine that an auditor reviewed and stamped this as a coherent body of work beggars belief.
Cluely did the ChatGPT wrapper to cheat on interviews then sold the customer data to recruiters. The whole company promise is a scam, and useless since we have LLMs.
HockeyStack held contests for people to win cars etc and never delivered. They also lied about having revenues and a product when they had nothing built. Along with Greptile they were doing 7day weeks of unpaid labor from “trial periods”.
Scams all around.
intermediaries like delve have only amplified this failure.
it was obvious to anyone who was involved in this industry that, all of this is just security theatre with nothing really to back it up.
We were actually looking at it as well recently (we're using Drata). I was thinking "Cool, this looks like the next cool step forward". The claims didn't sound out of the world in my ears.
Every time an issue like this appears I wonder how many more undiscovered frauds are out there.
Thus providing compliance is really just paying someone to shift responsibility.
The regulator can ask whether you are compliant. You can present certificate from Delve or someone else and that's the end of it.
[1] No offense to MBA, just using it as a placeholder for: business stakeholder with no IT background.