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Comment by piltdownman | Hacker News Reader

She's a sociopath who defrauded a number of high-profile U.S. presidential cabinet officials, and was jailed for forming "the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history" and then shamelessly deceiving them into publicly supporting her.

The support of Schultz, Kissinger, Matis et al rendered her the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, youngest recipient of the Horatio Alger Award, and Obama's Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. She then chilled out John Carreyrou and The Wall Street Journal financially and legally for trying to expose her deception

The only reason she was not convinced for patient fraud was a weak jury deciding the patients were "one-step removed" from Holmes as CEO.

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Yes and none of these people asked anyone with clinical laboratory knowledge whether this device could work. Many analytes need a venous draw to attain accurate results. So even if they only used a drop of blood that blood would have to be obtained the same way as a tube is now.

It would be like a young man dropping out of school and claiming they have GPU technology that is 2x nvidia performance. Everyone would laugh and demand proof. But they all didn't do the most basic of due diligence here

She largely defrauded idiots on the investor side, granted. But that's still not allowed. Even defrauding idiots is a crime.

There is a different bar for regular joe investors and "Professional Investors" [0]. These were Professional Investors.

[0] A professional investor is an individual or legal entity that possesses the experience, knowledge, and expertise necessary to make their own investment decisions and duly assess the risks associated with these decisions.

Are you talking about accredited investors? In the US, the only criteria to be an accredited investor, more or less, is having a net worth of over a million or an income over 200k. The above looks a bit more like a European definition, though even there it's optimistic, and in practice "has lots of money" is good enough for accredited investor status in the EU as well.

To be clear, most of the investors weren't VCs and things; they were, largely, individual rich idiots (or their family offices, at their direction). Theranos had trouble with real VCs, who wanted inconvenient things like audited accounts.

The rules protecting accredited investors are indeed laxer than those protecting normal people, but it is _still not legal to defraud them_.

Agree. But the crypto racket seems to be on a roll as never before nonetheless.

Crypto does seem to have carved out a "most laws don't apply to us" niche, and particularly in the US this seems like it'll get worse before it gets better. That hardly excuses Holmes, though.

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