Yup. For example at the time I was IT director of a doc com in the UK. Autonomy came to me and pitched their product, which was basically an enterprise-wide indexer thing which you could point at a file share and it would index all the documents, including looking inside MS Office files and then you could search it all. So quite far ahead of its time for what must have been like 1999 or so.

I told them their product didn't really meet any pressing need we had and was a bit expensive so thanks but no thanks. They came back with the proposal that instead of buying the software I could buy (from them) a really expensive NAS and they would throw the indexer in for free and the advantage for me would be that because it was hardware the expenditure could be written off against tax over time as depreciation.

It sounded sketchy so I didn't bite, but in essence they pitched me on the exact fraudulent thing that he was acquitted of.

I'm amazed that Lynch got off. Legal technicality? Would love to see an analysis and explanation.