The founder of blood testing company Theranos is convicted of fraud and once claimed to be "blood to check cancer"

People's Vision Image, founder of blood testing company Theranos

On January 3, local time, a jury convicted four of the 11 counts facing Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the blood testing company Theranos. Previously, the company had claimed that it could quickly detect whether a person had cancer, diabetes and other diseases by collecting several drops of blood from the fingertips, which was considered to have "set off a revolution in disease diagnosis."

According to the Wall Street Journal reported on the 3rd, according to the indictment, Holmes was charged with nine counts of telecommunications fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit telecommunications fraud, of which 4 were convicted and 4 were not convicted. For the other three charges, a verdict has not yet been made due to the difficulty of the jury reaching a consensus on that day. Prosecutors could choose to conduct new trials in the future for unsolved charges.

According to previous reports, Holmes' entrepreneurial story began in 2003. At the age of 19, she dropped out of Stanford University and founded Theranos. The company later claimed that its Edison testing device could detect more than 200 indicators, including cholesterol and cancer, in about four hours by collecting only a few drops of fingertip blood. In October 2015, an investigative report in the Wall Street Journal revealed the true face of Theranos, who had been reduced to blood test scammers. The report revealed that Theranos' blood test results cannot be guaranteed to be accurate, and most of its claimed blood tests are done on traditional equipment, rather than the self-developed Edison device.

Subsequently, a spate of regulatory investigations put the company in trouble, leading to the company's collapse in 2018 and Holmes's trial in August 2020. The Financial Times reported that the trial focused primarily on whether Holmes had deliberately defrauded investors of its company, with prosecutors presenting a large body of documentary evidence and testimony from 29 witnesses who detailed the Theranos lab's problems and the company's flickering rhetoric toward investors. The evidence provides the most detailed description of how Theranos operates, revealing how Holmes appears to be promoting misleading information on multiple occasions.

Holmes' conviction for defrauding investors gave federal prosecutors a victory in "one of silicon's most high-profile criminal fraud cases." Unless the ruling is overturned on appeal, Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison. But the Wall Street Journal report also pointed out that there are many steps to go before determining how many years Holmes has been sentenced, and the sentencing may take six months or more.