What's an example of a fakery that doesn't harm innocent parties? If you pretend a product (or a feature) that doesn't exist exists, then at the very least a competitor is unfairly harmed.
Innocent is perhaps the operative word. If investors expect and/or used to certain amount of fakery they are not "innocent" [1] or if the competitors are doing the same thing they are not necessarily "innocent" either.
[1] In this context to take meaning as knowledge, not meaning "not guilty" here.
If a site like Reddit gets started by creating nonexistent or sock-puppet users, for instance, that's hardly on the same level as falsifying medical tests "just until we get the bugs sorted out."
