If I had a dollar for every time a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum has been charged with fraud, I’d have $5. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it has happened five times.
By now, the Forbes “curse” has been well documented, from Charlie Javice’s JPMorgan fiasco (who was on the Under 30 list in 2019) to crypto poster boy Sam Bankman-Fried perpetrating one of the biggest financial frauds in history (he appeared on the list in 2021). This week, another honoree has been hit with federal charges.
Gökçe Güven, the 26-year-old founder and CEO of fintech startup Kalder, faces 52 years in prison after being charged with fraud, accused of cheating investors out of millions. Güven was also featured in last year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Marketing and Advertising category.
The U.S. Department of Justice alleges that, during Kalder’s seed round in April of 2024, Güven raised $7 million from more than a dozen investors, presenting a pitch deck that misrepresented the number of brands working with the startup and inflated revenues.
The 30 Under 30 to prison pipeline has not gone unnoticed online.
“Getting on the Forbes 30 Under 30 is weird: 2% likelihood you become a billionaire, 35% likelihood your company fails, 63% likelihood you end up in white collar prison because you stole money trying to become a billionaire, and then your company fails” tech entrepreneur Chris Bakke noted on X on Monday.
“Someone needs to write about what it says about contemporary capitalism that SO MANY of the Forbes 30 under 30 list are frauds!” another X user wrote. “They should make a 30 under 30 where the people are doing legal stuff,” another suggested.
Güven joins the ranks of other infamous alleged fraudsters, many of which Forbes featured themselves on their inaugural Hall of Shame for “Under 30 picks we wish we could take back” in November 2023.
“Regrets, we’ve had a few,” the publication wrote at the time.
Among them is Bankman-Fried, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture after defrauding his customers out of more than $8 billion.
Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s sometimes girlfriend, who ran his Alameda Research crypto trading operation also followed in his footsteps, making the 30 Under 30 list the next year. In December 2022, Ellison pleaded guilty to seven criminal charges, including wire fraud and money laundering.
In September 2025, Charlie Javice was sentenced to more than seven years for defrauding JPMorgan Chase out of $175 million to push through the sale of her student financial aid app, Frank.
In 2023, real estate investor and 2016 30 Under 30 honoree Nate Paul was charged with various counts of wire fraud. Five years after making the list, ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli was sentenced to 7 years in prison for fraud in 2018, after hiking the price of a life-saving HIV drug by 4,000%.
Many more 30 Under 30 alumni, while avoiding felony charges, have faced accusations ranging from sexual harassment to fostering toxic workplace culture.
While it’s easy to dunk on Forbes for jinxing these bright young things by inviting them into an exclusive club with a not unremarkable number of grifters and fraudsters, the real culprit here, as Arwa Mahdawi wrote for The Guardian in 2023, is “the fetishizing of youth”.
“30 Under 30 isn’t just a list, it’s a mentality: a pressure to achieve great things before youth slips away from you,” she wrote. “The pressure can lead certain ambitious people to take shortcuts.”
For those hoping to make the class of 2026, just know the Securities Exchange Commission is watching.
