Don't believe the engagement numbers just as is

I was leading a team which was involved in building the retention loop for a consumer app( dating/social), and the trigger we were using to send alerts to the dormant users from the backend was completely fake. It was supposed to send a ping and provide a generic 'someone viewed your profile' message to minimize the drop-offs we had. It was such a hit feature that led to 150% growth in DAU numbers within a week. i was promoted, the star. My manager was promoted too.. But i knew inside something wasn't correct, the alert just meant a bot pinged them but they still had to find a real match sometime and 150% growth was just not something I could digest. I asked the team to switch it off last Wednesday, the whole company esp. Marketing teams were baying for my blood. After a month, there was cohort analysis, and we realised the users were just opening the app to check the alert but were never actually engaging with it. The app lost almost 40% of its core users to uninstalls. No one wanted to believe this at all from top to bottom. The company never told the investors we fudged up but instead raised more funding by mentioning the 150% growth. From then on I realised most investors are just watchmen. They want to be on the fast growth more than being on the correct growth. Don't believe anything on pitch decks that you read. Almost all DAU numbers are cooked.