The major companies aren't "Silicon Valley" to the normal person, though. There was a reason the show "Silicon Valley" was about a startup and not some boring middle manager working for Google or Facebook.
There's obviously too many startups to form a solid impression of percentages but I don't think the rate of fraud in startups is noticeably higher then in any other major city. Some small fraction of startups, businesses, entrepreneurs, etc., will be outright frauds anywhere.
Maybe some viewers believed that literally 100% of the startup population has honest intentions, and then they become disappointed in reality?
