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\n Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Youtube\/@Forbes; Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
G\u00f6k\u00e7e G\u00fcven had a rule for new employees at her fintech company headquartered in lower Manhattan a couple of blocks away from the New York Stock Exchange: \u201cRub the Wall Street bull\u2019s balls.\u201d The tradition, she wrote on LinkedIn in October 2025 \u2014 with accompanying pictures of her and her team smiling while touching the big bronze testicles \u2014 started as a joke. But, G\u00fcven wrote, \u201cthe belief that something might bring you luck is powerful.\u201d So she wanted to pay homage to this \u201cvery shiny symbol of ambition\u201d as her company, Kalder, took on the world of corporate rewards points. \u201cBelief fuels execution,\u201d she wrote<\/a>. \u201cHere\u2019s to charging forward.\u201d<\/p>\n G\u00fcven\u2019s drive to succeed had already taken her from her home in Turkey to the University of California, Berkeley, where she fell in love with the Bay Area start-up culture that has produced generations of ultrarich tech founders. As a 26-year-old CEO, she was well on her way to becoming one: By 2025, G\u00fcven had landed $10.5 million in funding and made it onto the Forbes 30 Under 30 list<\/a>, posing<\/a> with a diamond tennis bracelet on one arm and an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak on the other. The caption noted that the watch, which retails for around $50,000 used, was \u201cher own.\u201d<\/p>\n Like many young founders, G\u00fcven spoke in grand terms of \u201ctransforming\u201d her corner of the business world with her company. In exchange for a small processing fee, Kalder provided client companies with their own cash-back rewards points that customers could then use at other businesses partnered with G\u00fcven\u2019s firm. Consumers would get more perks from their purchases, and businesses would cultivate more customer loyalty \u2014 a win-win. Venture-capital funds, including Gingerbread Capital, which focuses on funding young women founders, were eager to invest in or advise one with a background in software engineering. \u201cI really wanted to support a young female technical founder because that\u2019s not so common,\u201d says one Kalder adviser, a marketing executive with major clients in Europe. Forbes wrote<\/a> that Kalder had a $35 million valuation and brought in $1.5 million in revenue in 2024. The company\u2019s website boasted of deals with household brands like Nike and Godiva, but G\u00fcven had her eye on a much bigger prize. \u201cOur market is the $250 billion spend\u201d that firms make on loyalty points and maintaining customers, she said<\/a> in a 2022 interview. \u201cAnd we want to take it all.\u201d<\/p>\n By the time G\u00fcven was posting photos with Charging Bull on LinkedIn, her determination to be wildly successful was already threatening to bring her career to an early, crashing halt. On Thanksgiving Night last year, she was arrested<\/a> by federal agents as she returned to the U.S. from a trip to Turkey. In January, charges of wire and securities fraud were made public. Former friends outside the company said they were shocked to see that G\u00fcven was allegedly running the time-tested<\/a> tech scam of lying to investors to prop up her firm until it actually brought in money.<\/p>\n According to the indictment, G\u00fcven had been keeping a bogus set of books to entice investors. While she claimed an annual revenue north of $1 million, the real number was much more modest: Kalder had made only $60,000 in total revenue since 2023. Feds say she cooked the books and invented deals with top clients, including Godiva, to \u201cswindle\u201d investors out of $7 million as she burned through their money trying to get the company upright. G\u00fcven has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and she and her attorneys \u2014 who include a white-shoe lawyer who prosecuted Sam Bankman-Fried \u2014 did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n Wire fraud and securities fraud are standard<\/a> issue<\/a> for many tech founders who have previously waded into criminal territory. But by allegedly forging the recommendations and signatures of business contacts on her immigration papers, G\u00fcven was also charged with visa fraud and aggravated identity theft. On March 10, prosecutors added a second aggravated-identity-theft charge: G\u00fcven had allegedly forged and signed a contract with an unnamed business, then told prospective investors it was real, in a move out of Carlos Watson\u2019s playbook<\/a> at Ozy.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a famous Silicon Valley thing where you have a very gray line of faking it until you make it,\u201d says one former adviser. \u201cBut this was not a gray area.\u201d<\/p>\n As the government builds its case against G\u00fcven, former staffers and business partners are scrubbing the Kalder name from their LinkedIn pages and wondering what about the company was real at all. \u201cShe struck me as very smart and passionate about the work that she was doing,\u201d says one small-business owner who partnered with Kalder. \u201cIt was only last year when I noticed that features were always \u2018in the pipeline\u2019 and never ready to launch, sometimes even after months of discussions for seemingly simple things.\u201d<\/p>\n When G\u00fcven arrived at the UC Berkeley as an 18-year-old in 2018, people who knew her say she fit right in. Although a member of Gen Z, she was already sold on the millennial tech dream of founding a company to improve the world \u2014 or at least the customer experience \u2014 while making a pile of money along the way. \u201cShe was seeing all these amazing things happen and these stories of success, and she was enjoying being in that scene,\u201d says a former mentor.<\/p>\n \u201cWe talked a lot about philosophy and the cutting edge of technology,\u201d the former mentor says. G\u00fcven gave them a book on wabi-sabi, the Japanese philosophy of design. They chatted, like everyone else in the Bay Area, about Charles Eisenstein\u2019s Sacred Economics, a 2011 book on how to return the monetary system to a more altruistic setting. G\u00fcven was interested in the Myers-Briggs personality test and the crypto fads of the day, such as non-fungible tokens. \u201cI love flights because I can reflect and focus on passion projects in a liminal space,\u201d she posted<\/a> on X around this time. She was the type of college student who would willingly blog<\/a> about how the 2019 crypto-market crash could impact wider crypto adoption in the future. She didn\u2019t talk all that much about her life back home in Turkey. \u201cFrom what I understood, her family\u2019s pretty wealthy,\u201d says the former mentor.<\/p>\n If G\u00fcven had the grand vision, this person says, she lacked some of the technical skills to build a company herself. \u201cI had a feeling that she was always more attracted to design,\u201d they say. \u201cYeah, I don\u2019t think she coded.\u201d<\/p>\n Soon after graduating from Berkeley in 2022 with a bachelor of arts in cognitive science and a bachelor of science in business administration, G\u00fcven began polishing her r\u00e9sum\u00e9 to make it seem as if she had the technical experience to build a tech company. Her LinkedIn claims that during her college years, she was working \u201cfull time\u201d at Robinhood and the crypto developer cLabs, where she engineered products including crypto wallets. But a former cLabs staffer says she \u201cexaggerated\u201d a summer role; a representative for Robinhood says she was only a summer intern on the product-design team.<\/p>\n G\u00fcven\u2019s liberties with the truth soon became more serious. In November 2022, two days before Bankman-Fried\u2019s FTX went bankrupt, Kalder announced<\/a> a $3.5 million seed-funding round. Press releases cited<\/a> Meltem Demirors, a crypto strategist with a significant following<\/a> on social media, as an angel investor. \u201cWe spoke on the phone a few times over the summer of 2022,\u201d Demirors wrote in an email. \u201cI listened to her ideas, gave her feedback, and introduced her to investors who were doing consumer tech deals and might be interested in her round. This is very much normal in early-stage venture \u2014 investors talk to founders and to each other all the time.\u201d But Demirors was clear: \u201cI am not, nor have ever been, an investor in Kalder.\u201d<\/p>\n Demirors said she was not surprised by G\u00fcven\u2019s invention. \u201cReputation laundering happens a lot in venture and crypto, and it\u2019s impossible to control,\u201d she wrote. The fabrications accrued. Even though Nike was listed as a partner on Kalder\u2019s site, the sports giant said in an email that Kalder \u201cdoes not appear on any of our contracts.\u201d Booking.com<\/a> said in an email that it \u201cdoes not have a partnership\u201d despite the suggestion otherwise on Kalder\u2019s website.<\/p>\n G\u00fcven lived in a $4,000-a-month apartment near Wall Street decorated with tasteful posters of Alexander Calder mobiles<\/a> and rented a co-working space above Charging Bull to house her company of about a dozen. \u201cCoworking spaces are college libraries for adults,\u201d she tweeted<\/a>. With Kalder\u2019s appearance of a growing start-up, more investors were coming in. In 2024, the company landed<\/a> a $7 million seed round with sophisticated backers including Noah Doyle of Javelin Venture Partners. Doyle, a co-founder of a points system acquired by United Airlines in 2001, also joined as the sole other board member along with G\u00fcven, according to people familiar with the arrangement.<\/p>\n Despite G\u00fcven\u2019s exaggerations, her employees did have a service to sell to clients, which is not always a given<\/a> for 30 Under 30 alumni. \u201cThe product did work,\u201d says a former adviser. \u201cIt\u2019s not like there was no product.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, there were concerns about Kalder\u2019s reach in a market for rewards programs packed with well-financed competition. I asked a product manager in the payments industry if Kalder was breaking ground as a service for small businesses to provide loyalty points. \u201cYou mean like a punch card? People definitely do that,\u201d they said. Major point-of-sale systems like Square already have loyalty programs, as does the massive e-commerce platform Shopify \u2014 two huge barriers to market dominance for a small start-up.<\/p>\n Former employees also say that, on a technical level, Kalder never quite developed its API, or application programming interface, a software protocol for different apps to communicate with one another. Without an API, the promise of a universal rewards program in which consumers could pay at one company and use their cash back at another could not fully be realized. \u201cAs we started to look at some of these deployments and test the products, it started to look a little shaky,\u201d says the former adviser.<\/p>\n But Kalder kept growing until the spring of 2025, at which point an employee went to Doyle with concerns about the company. According to prosecutors<\/a>, Doyle hired outside counsel to conduct an audit. Kalder\u2019s total revenue since its inception was around $200,000 \u2014 millions short of G\u00fcven\u2019s claims. Doyle had to tell one large investor that the start-up\u2019s revenue streams were \u201cfundamentally projections\u201d of revenue. (No charges have been filed against Doyle, who declined to comment.)<\/p>\n G\u00fcven was cooperative with the inquiry at first, say a former employee and an adviser, but she began fighting back as it exposed her fabrications. \u201cIt was pretty obvious that she felt her position was threatened in the company,\u201d says the former adviser, who adds that G\u00fcven locked employees out of Kalder\u2019s computer system. \u201cShe felt that people were coming after her.\u201d According to one staffer, G\u00fcven also canceled employees\u2019 health insurance, though the company still deducted the premiums from their checks. By August, she had fired everyone and started over with a small group of her close friends, including her sister, who is currently finishing her M.B.A. Prosecutors claim that in October, after Doyle stepped down from the board, he called one investor who wanted his money back and told him G\u00fcven was \u201cfast and loose with a lot of her projections.\u201d He advised not to sue because any \u201clegal action would quickly use up\u201d Kalder\u2019s funds; from speaking with a former prosecutor, Doyle was under the impression that a securities-violation case against G\u00fcven would be \u201cextremely weak.\u201d It was around this time that federal prosecutors in New York began investigating Kalder: One of the fired employees had come to the Securities and Exchange Commission seeking a whistleblower reward for exposing the alleged fraud.<\/p>\n When the indictment was made public in January, tech circles on social media lit up with posts about the alleged fraud \u2014 not because of the flashiness of the rewards business or the $10.5 million number attached but because of G\u00fcven\u2019s Forbes status. They added her to the so-called<\/a> Forbes 30 Under 30 pipeline to prison, a reference to the pattern of young founders who make the list and, often within years, face indictments. These founders include Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison of FTX; crypto fraudster Do Kwon; Charlie Javice, who fraudulently boosted the customer numbers of her financial-aid company, Frank; and pharma bro Martin Shkreli. (Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes technically never made the list, though people often tack her on because she hosted the Forbes Under 30 Summit in 2015 \u2014 and because of the infamous, laudatory Forbes magazine cover<\/a> of Holmes holding a vial of blood.) Forbes itself acknowledged the pattern with a Hall of Shame<\/a> post in 2023. \u201cRegrets, we\u2019ve had a few,\u201d the editors wrote. \u201cThe 30 Under 30 list is, by definition, future-facing, and not even Warren Buffett can predict with 100 percent accuracy.\u201d<\/p>\n