NY Times Exposé Reveals Potential Fraud, Investment Call Impersonator, and Vastly Exaggerated Traffic Numbers at Ozy Media
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The FBI is reportedly investigating Ozy, a multi-million dollar media company, on allegations of fraud after one of the company’s top leaders impersonated a YouTube executive in an effort to sell the company to Goldman Sachs.
The Feb. 2 incident reportedly took place when Goldman Sachs’ asset management division believed it would be meeting over Zoom with YouTube’s head of unscripted programming, Alex Piper, according to an account published Sunday by The New York Times reporter Ben Smith. Piper said he was running late and asked to hold the meeting by telephone instead, and Goldman’s team obliged. But when they noticed he appeared to be using a digitally altered voice, they contacted YouTube — and discovered the real Piper knew nothing about the call.
Ozy CEO Carlos Watson attributed blame for the incident to co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Samir Rao, according to sources familiar with the interactions between Ozy and Goldman. Watson, who provided the email address Goldman executives used, said Rao suffered a “mental health crisis,” but had recovered and has returned to Ozy.
Goldman did not take action over the incident. However, the sources said, the security team at YouTube’s parent company, Google, did refer the impersonation of its executive to the FBI, leading the bureau to engage with Goldman.
“Samir is a valued colleague and a close friend,” Watson said in a statement to The Times. “I’m proud that we stood by him while he struggled, and we’re all glad to see him now thriving again.”
Ozy Chairman Marc Lasry, a co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team, echoed Watson’s defense of Rao. “The board was made aware of the incident, and we fully support the way it was handled,” Lasry said. “The incident was an unfortunate one-time event, and Carlos and his team showed the kind of compassion we would all want if any of us faced a difficult situation in our own lives.”
Ozy — a news website some may view as obscure in the digital-media world — may face additional problems, including the claim that it is has been vastly exaggerating traffic numbers. Smith, who served as the chief editor of when it engaged in acquisition talks with Ozy several years ago, noted that it claimed 50 million unique monthly users in 2019 — nearly half of the roughly 100 million drawn by global brands including CNN and The New York Times.
Comscore data, by contrast, suggested Ozy’s traffic topped out at 2.5 million during certain months in 2018, and had fallen to a monthly figure short of half a million by 2021. A 2017 BuzzFeed investigation suggested the discrepancy could be accounted for by paid traffic, “including ad networks that specialize in pop-under browser windows that are opened on users as they visit other websites.”
While it is not unheard for some websites in the industry to pay for traffic — or to utilize questionable techniques resulting in traffic numbers that critics might argue are inflated — such as “low-quality” traffic generated by pop-ups, which result in fake ad impressions for which advertisers are billed, can result in allegations of fraud.
Watson insisted the website’s traffic was “completely real.”
“It’s the result of our team acting pretty fearlessly to launch and grow five newsletters, 12 TV shows, six podcasts, now four annual festivals starting next year, and the Ozy Genius Awards,” he added. “Each of our verticals is thriving, and we stand completely behind our numbers and performance.”
