Ten years ago, Jain left a lucrative post at Microsoft to "make a billion dollars for myself," as he told Fortune when he appeared on the "40 under 40" list in 1999. That year, Jain -- who cites Bill Gates as his role model --was worth $861 million, and his startup search firm InfoSpace was in its beginning stages.
Since then, though, Jain has had legal troubles: In 2000, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said that InfoSpace had lost $200 million more than it reported, opening up a bevy of investigations against the company -- and in 2003 Jain was found guilty of insider trading.
Jain moved on to found Intelius, a website specializing in selling background information about people. But his business practices are being criticized once again: Intelius customers are suing Jain for fraud, claiming Intelius and one of its partners, Adaptive Marketing, stole consumer data to auto-enroll them in various membership programs. Another suit accuses Jain of inflating financial figures. In 2006, the Feds began looking into whether Intelius was illegally disseminating credit card information. A spokesperson for Intelius said the company is "vigorously defending" the class-action litigation and would not comment on the federal investigation.
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