Pretending to be a bigger company than you are is not fraud, it's perception management. Whether justified or not, many potential customers will choose a seemingly bigger company over a smaller one (especially a one-person company).

Now if they were billing based on number of people working for a client, and they were charging for phantom people, that would be fraud.

This guy just has an optimized workflow that he presents as if it were a team of people. If the customer feels that's unreasonable, they wouldn't pay. There's nothing unethical about that.

> Pretending to be a bigger company than you are is not fraud, it's perception management.

That's some pretty fancy doublespeak right there.

No. I'm sorry, but this is flat out lying. You can rationalize it all you like, but if you are lying and inventing people that don't exist, it's fraud.

This isn't even lying by omission, but actively working to deceive.

Sure, the customer may be getting full value for their money, but then why is the lying necessary?

Now, wikipedia may not be right, but I imagine there's been plenty of effort by legally knowledgeable people to define "Fraud" well.

First statement in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud :

"In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right."

And later, a clarification:

"the requisite elements of fraud as a tort generally are the intentional misrepresentation or concealment of an important fact upon which the victim is meant to rely, and in fact does rely, to the harm of the victim."

By your definitions, most businesses would be committing "fraud". Many, many, many companies have multiple emails, multiple phone numbers, even multiple mailing boxes that may all be handled by one person but which serve to filter and separate incoming contacts and certainly also present a level of professionalism that some customers find comforting.

And what about companies that have the same service but present it differently (to look niche or specific) to different audiences via different websites? Are they being fraudulent by making their potential customers feel uniquely served?

There are so many more examples I could bring up related to marketing, presentation, etc.

Not really. Many companies do it with AI. Ziprecruiter is one...the emails you get are from "Phil" (phil@ziprecruiter.com) but Phil doesn't exist. Granted, if you reply to Phil you are explicitly told 1) Phil doesn't exist, it is AI, and 2) email replies to Phil are ignored. But making up people as a customer service interface is pretty common.

Except one consideration that lead to paying what they are paying is that they also get the risk reduction and redundancy of a team and not a single person who could easily end up out of action taking all productivity with them.

These days, companies much larger than one person can shut down overnight, without warning. It happens.

Frankly, barring some accident, I'm betting the solo company is more motivated to keep things running than the larger company that might sell out to a larger rival and allow their service to be shut down or changed negatively (with little or no warning to customers).

I agree with most of the other comments on your statement here. What's interesting is that your arguing from a factual point of view, while I was considering it from a social point of view. I can't imagine running an (imo) unethical company like this and feel comfortable with it.

Your last point isn't valid by the way, customer don't know whether it's reasonable or not, because they don't know. They are buying something else then what they are told they are buying, which is unethical by my standards.

It is unethical, whether they find it that way or not. Nearly $1MM/year in revenue and they feel the need to email multiple times from different fake emails? Pathetic.

I rather find it stupid that in B2B companies seem too only "trust" bigger companies than small startups. We also always have to claim how big we are and how successful just to build trust. Companies don't seem to understand that you can be good in what you're doing even if you're small or a one-man-show. This is the real unethical part imo.