‘Industry’ Season 4 captures tech fraud better than any other show on TV right now.

HBO’s hit financial thriller ‘Industry’ featured one of the season’s most compelling storylines: the hunt to expose a fraudulent fintech company called Tender.

The show follows Harper Stern, who heads a newly formed investment firm and is looking for companies to short. You are essentially betting that the stock will crash. After a reporter informs her that something is wrong with Tender, she sends her colleagues Sweetpea and Kwabena to Ghana to investigate.

What they discovered is horrifying. “Fake users generate fake revenue, thereby generating fake cash,” Sweetpea tells Harper. The entire company appears to be built on fabricated numbers. “That’s nothing.”

What’s exciting about this season of “Industry” is how well it represents this moment. Tender launches as a payment processing platform for adult content. The show references the very real (and still controversial) online safety legislation introduced by the UK, which resulted in age verification and other tightened rules for online consumption of adult content. Because of its affiliation with adult content, Tender runs afoul of the new government’s regulations and must, as the saying goes, pivot or die.

CFO-turned-leader Whitney wants the company to transform into a bank, and has a plan to make it happen, including making Henry, Tender’s CEO, the face of that change. Whitney is the embodiment of every tech baron cliché. Move quickly and destroy things. Win at any cost. He is lobbying politicians to get banking licenses and find merger opportunities.

Meanwhile, Harper feels underpowered at her previous company and is leading her newly launched company after being called a DEI factory by the man who hired her (a nod to the decline of DEI over the past few years). She teams up with new friends and old frenemies to find blood. That means the company is on the verge of collapse. To her, Tender is that kind of company.

This puts her at odds with her friend Yasmin, who is married to Henry and is creating a communications and lobbying strategy for Tender. It’s Pride and Prejudice – the sugar and spice that helps make the world go ’round.

The show has captured the world of technology with such precision that reality itself begins to feel like a satire. Even TechCrunch has name-checked it as part of Tender’s media playbook.

There is commentary on fascism through the character Moritz, who lobbies against Western liberalism and is reluctant to sell his family’s bank to Whitney. Whitney’s last name is Halberstram, which sounds Jewish. This character is probably a nod to the growing ‘technofascism’ criticism of some tech tycoons.

Meanwhile, Harper is still a calculating sociopath. “My real passion is finding dead people walking,” she said at an investor breakfast. She ends up raising millions of dollars for her new company.

She is the only character whose very existence undermines credibility. By nature, she must be shrewdly calculating. Unlike Yasmin and Henry, she has nothing to back down from when she fails. But would a notoriously exclusive, notoriously white British institution actually allow black American women to rise through the ranks and beat them at their own game?

“Who needs realism when she’s such a great character,” said one black British founder.

He said the show aptly captured how detached the British upper class was from the results and was, in fact, one of the few shows to “accurately depict the ruthlessness of the British elite, particularly the way they manipulate the media and government to suit their whims.”

“Nepotism and lack of boundaries in the workplace and people sleeping together for trade secrets are unfortunately very real and common,” one European investor added.

Meanwhile, Yasmine is heading down a dark path. Earlier this season, she organized a three-legged love affair between her husband, Henry, and Whitney’s assistant, Hayley. As the season continues, her behavior becomes so hedonistic that one reviewer has already likened her to Ghislaine Maxwell. Perhaps the perfect symbol of what lies in the pit of money and power and the role some women play in digging that hole.

But at least for Whitney, her Icarus moment may be coming.

By now, audiences are well aware of how real-world founders sometimes use tricks to exaggerate their success (like Charlie Harvey’s Frank) and steal money from investors and the public (the FTX cryptocurrency meltdown). There are many infamous cases like this, some even mentioned on TV. But perhaps the most relevant real-world parallel to Tender is the ultimate collapse of German fintech Wirecard a few years ago.

Wirecard has admitted that reported billions of dollars in cash likely did not exist, despite the company’s initial claims that two banks in the Philippines held the funds. This was a story of complex accounting and legal gray areas, much like the financial fraud depicted in Tender. Short-sellers also followed Wirecard, with one blog calling them “alternative whistleblowers.” These are the people who step in when “markets and regulators refuse to see what’s in front of them.”

The philosophy is one that it’s easy to see Harper embracing soon. Especially after Eric tells her at one point that “short-term work is ugly, difficult, investigative” and “anti-status, anti-establishment, anti-power.”

With Wirecard, numerous people were arrested, including the CEO, and the COO went on the run (and was accused of being a Russian spy). Tender’s fate remains unrealized until the final few episodes run. One of the best things about “industry” is that it moves quickly and solves problems. It’s so clearly set in our times and its attitude is so bold that audiences are forced to choose their favorite antihero and tag along.

It’s a rush and a thrill. It is a visual embodiment of the absence of ethical capitalists. But just like in real life, we can never get enough.