The former CFO of an ad fraud detection company has agreed to pay a $30,000 civil fine in the wake of allegations that he misled investors.
Joshua Weiss, previously the finance chief of Kubient, has consented to a final judgment that includes the fine and a three-year ban preventing him from serving as an officer or director of a publicly traded company, according to a June 23 litigation release from the SEC.
Notably, Weiss agreed to the judgment on July 8 but did not admit to the SEC’s allegations against him, the release said.
An SEC spokesperson declined to comment beyond the Thursday release.
In September 2024, the commission charged Weiss, Kubient audit committee chair Grainne Coen and CEO Paul Roberts with violating antifraud securities law and lying to auditors. The SEC charged Weiss and Coen in one complaint and Roberts in another, both in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
At the time, the SEC said that Roberts led Kubient to “fraudulently inflate its revenue.” The commission also said that Roberts asserted that the revenue figures showed that the company’s flagship product, known as “Kubient Artificial Intelligence” or KAI, was successful.
“In reality, KAI, a product that purportedly detects real-time fraud during digital advertising auctions, had not generated any meaningful revenue,” the SEC alleged. “The CEO fabricated fraud analyses that he claimed were prepared by KAI for two customers as part of beta tests despite Kubient not obtaining the customers’ data to analyze.”
Instead of correcting the record, the commission alleged, Weiss and Coen apparently went along with Roberts’ scheme. The SEC said the pair “made additional false statements in Kubient’s later public filings.”
“In addition, Weiss and Coen both lied to Kubient’s independent auditor about the revenue at issue and their knowledge of concerns raised internally about the transactions supporting the revenue,” the 2024 complaint read.
In an email to CFO.com, Weiss’s attorney Paul Krieger said Weiss “firmly denies the allegations that he acted improperly.”
“At all times, Mr. Weiss acted reasonably, in good faith, and in reliance on expert and legal advice,” Krieger said.
Roberts pleaded guilty to securities fraud and in March 2025 was sentenced to one year and one day in prison. The SEC’s civil case came after his plea, sister publication CFO Dive reported. Coen’s attorneys, meanwhile, have requested to adjourn the case to a later date due to her sister’s terminal cancer diagnosis.
Kubient filed an initial public offering on Nasdaq in August 2020 but was delisted in November 2023. The company filed for Chapter 7 voluntary bankruptcy in July 2024.
The company previously claimed to offer proprietary AI-powered tech that “stops ad fraud in its tracks pre-bid, as opposed to measuring a portion of traffic for fraud or measuring fraud after the fact,” according to marketing materials.
The company’s status today isn’t clear. Kubient’s website, which still hosts an announcement about Weiss’s appointment as CFO in January 2020, now hawks a “trusted guide to discovering the safest and most rewarding Australia online casinos.” Messages sent to email addresses listed on the company’s website didn’t immediately elicit a response on Thursday.
