Do not get Webfished. A founder lost $230K USD to a so-called dev Team and had no Working Product After 1 year.

Met a founder recently. Desperate. $230K USD spent. 1 year in. No working product. Nothing real to show for it.

He hired a so-called dev team. They looked legit. Proposals, meetings, progress updates, the whole thing. Classic signs of a team doing real work.

I did a full audit on everything they delivered.

It was placeholder content generated from a single prompt. No real architecture. No real system. No compliance checks. No security. Just AI slop dressed up to look like actual work.

$230K USD and 1 year for something I could identify as fake in 10 minutes.

The warning signs that are easy to miss when you are not technical:

No working demo after 3 months. Vague technical explanations when you ask specific questions. Deliverables that look polished in presentations but do nothing in practice. Contracts that bill for time, not outcomes.

The AI space is full of this right now. So-called dev teams who know how to use AI tools to look productive without actually building anything real. The output looks impressive until someone who knows what they are looking at reviews it.

Always audit what you are paying for. Ask for a live demo, not a slide deck. Ask specific technical questions and see if they can answer without deflecting.

Do not get webfished.

Has anyone else seen this happening?