Yes, round-tripping is considered fraud in business. The CEO and CFO committed fraud. That has been proven, and there is no doubt about it.
But the article also claims they misled investors about the technology they were using, and that part is false. It even mocked Indian developers for working as programmers and pretending to be machines, which is obviously absurd.
> This suggests they knew what was really going on, so it wasn't fraud in their eyes.
But now when we are talking about obvious fraud everyone agrees about and which caused investors to pull money you are pivoting to a quibble about whether the marketing was lies or not. Maybe a company which lies about its sales figures can't be trusted to be truthful about its product
But the article also claims they misled investors about the technology they were using, and that part is false. It even mocked Indian developers for working as programmers and pretending to be machines, which is obviously absurd.