Fraud can look very different from one case to another. Sometimes it involves a technology that does not work as advertised. Sometimes it involves false financial statements, manipulated stock prices or money that quietly ends up somewhere it was never supposed to go. The seven cases below cover all of those.
Elizabeth Holmes — Theranos
Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 with a pitch that sounded almost too good to be true: a small amount of blood from a finger prick could produce a wide range of medical test results.
Holmes told investors that Theranos had developed its own technology, known by names including Edison and the Theranos Sample Processing Unit, or TSPU. The company claimed its system could perform many tests with tiny blood samples and produce results faster and more accurately than conventional laboratory methods.
The problem was that the technology could not do what Holmes said it could.
According to the evidence presented at her trial, Holmes knew that Theranos could not consistently produce accurate and reliable results for a number of tests. The company also used commercially available laboratory analyzers for some patient testing, despite representations to investors that Theranos used its own analyzers.
Theranos still attracted major investors and signed a high-profile partnership with Walgreens. Holmes also gave investors financial projections that prosecutors said she knew were unrealistic. Theranos had told investors it expected more than $100 million in revenue in 2014 and about $1 billion in 2015. Prosecutors said the company actually expected only negligible or modest revenue in those years.
The company eventually collapsed, and federal prosecutors charged Holmes with fraud.
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In January 2022, a federal jury convicted her of one count of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of wire fraud against individual investors. The jury acquitted her on the patient-related fraud charges and could not reach a verdict on three other investor-fraud counts.
Holmes received 11 years and three months in federal prison in November 2022.
Trevor Milton — Nikola
Trevor Milton built Nikola around a very different vision: electric and hydrogen-powered trucks that could compete with conventional heavy-duty vehicles.
The company attracted enormous attention, and Milton became one of its most visible promoters. He used social media, television appearances, podcasts and interviews to make claims about Nikola’s technology and products.
Federal prosecutors later said several of those claims were false.
One of the most striking examples involved the Nikola One, a hydrogen-powered semi-truck prototype. Milton claimed that the truck was fully functional. According to evidence presented at his trial, the prototype was not operational. It lacked major components, including gears and motors. A promotional video that appeared to show the truck driving under its own power was actually filmed after the vehicle had been towed to the top of a hill and allowed to roll downhill.
Milton also claimed that Nikola had built its Badger pickup truck from the ground up with its own parts and technology. Prosecutors said that claim was false too.
There was another problem with Nikola’s supposed hydrogen business. Milton said the company was producing hydrogen at a low cost. Prosecutors said Nikola was not producing hydrogen at all.
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Milton was also accused of presenting reservations for future trucks as firm orders worth billions of dollars, even though most of those reservations could be cancelled.
A federal jury convicted Milton of securities and wire fraud in 2022. In December 2023, a judge sentenced him to four years in prison, three years of supervised release and a $1 million fine. He was also ordered to forfeit property in Utah.
The case is a useful reminder that a company’s future plans and a working product are two very different things. In Milton’s case, prosecutors said the problem was not simply that Nikola failed to deliver on ambitious promises. They argued that he knowingly made false claims about the company’s existing technology and products.
Laura Perryman — Stimwave Technologies
Laura Perryman’s case involved something much more concrete than a futuristic vehicle or a revolutionary laboratory.
Perryman founded Stimwave Technologies, a medical-device company that sold an implantable neurostimulation system for chronic pain.
The device included a component called the Pink Stylet, which functioned as a receiver. Some doctors found that the component was too long for certain patients and could not be shortened without affecting its function.
Instead of changing the price of the device or telling doctors not to use it in those cases, prosecutors said Perryman directed Stimwave to create another component: the White Stylet.
There was a major difference between the two.
The White Stylet was made entirely of plastic. It contained no copper and could not receive radiofrequency energy. In other words, it did not perform the function Stimwave claimed it performed.
Stimwave nevertheless marketed the White Stylet to doctors as a functional receiver. Perryman also oversaw training that described it as a receiver and directed employees to support that claim.
The financial incentive was substantial. Doctors could seek reimbursement from Medicare and private insurers for implanting a receiver. The relevant reimbursement code paid roughly $16,000 to $18,000 for the receiver component, according to the Justice Department.
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That meant patients could end up with a piece of plastic inside their bodies while doctors submitted insurance claims for the implantation of a functioning receiver.
A federal jury found Perryman guilty of health care fraud and conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud. In June 2024, she received six years in prison and three years of supervised release.
The case stands apart from Theranos in one important way. Theranos made claims about what its technology could do. Stimwave, according to prosecutors and the evidence at trial, put a nonfunctional component into an actual medical device and represented it as something else.
Sam Bankman-Fried — FTX: the crypto savior mirage
For a while, Sam Bankman-Fried looked like the person who could make cryptocurrency respectable.
He founded FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, and Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm. He became a familiar face in Washington and the media, appeared at major industry events and promoted himself as a cautious voice in a market known for spectacular failures.
Behind FTX’s public image, prosecutors said, customer money was moving somewhere it should not have gone.
Bankman-Fried directed billions of dollars in FTX customer deposits to Alameda, according to the Justice Department. Alameda then used the money for investments, political contributions, real estate purchases and other expenditures.
The government also said Bankman-Fried directed co-conspirators to change FTX’s computer code so Alameda could withdraw effectively unlimited amounts of cryptocurrency from the exchange.
That was not the only alleged deception. Prosecutors said Bankman-Fried used false financial statements for Alameda’s lenders, inflated FTX’s revenues and profits in information provided to investors, and backdated documents to conceal what was happening.
At his sentencing, the Justice Department said Bankman-Fried had misappropriated billions of dollars in FTX customer funds, defrauded FTX investors of more than $1.7 billion and defrauded Alameda’s lenders of more than $1.3 billion.
A federal jury convicted him in November 2023 on seven fraud and conspiracy counts.
In March 2024, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The court also ordered more than $11 billion in forfeiture.
The FTX story became one of the biggest corporate failures in the cryptocurrency industry because the company did not simply collapse after a bad investment. Prosecutors said customer funds were used without their permission while Bankman-Fried and others concealed the company’s financial position.
Mark Schena — Arrayit
Mark Schena’s Arrayit case has an obvious connection to Theranos: both companies sold the idea that a tiny blood sample could unlock much more medical information than conventional testing.
Schena was president of Arrayit, a Silicon Valley medical technology company. Prosecutors said he claimed the company had developed technology that could test for virtually any disease from a few drops of blood.
He also made ambitious claims about Arrayit’s value and business prospects. According to evidence presented at trial, Schena and his publicist told investors that he was the “father of microarray technology,” that he was on a shortlist for the Nobel Prize and that Arrayit could be worth $4.5 billion.
The company’s business also involved allergy testing.
Prosecutors said Arrayit ran screening tests for 120 allergens on patients regardless of whether the testing was medically necessary. Schena and others paid kickbacks to marketers to obtain patient blood samples, then billed Medicare and private insurers for the tests.
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Then the COVID-19 pandemic created another opportunity.
In early 2020, Schena announced that Arrayit had a COVID-19 test. Prosecutors said the company had not yet developed such a test when he made the announcement.
The government also said Schena claimed the test was highly accurate and could be more accurate than PCR testing. At the same time, he concealed the fact that the FDA had told him the test was not accurate enough to receive an Emergency Use Authorization.
A federal jury found Schena guilty in September 2022. The charges included securities fraud, health care fraud and illegal kickbacks. The government said the scheme involved more than $77 million in false and fraudulent claims for allergy and COVID-19 testing.
Schena received eight years in prison in October 2023 and was ordered to pay $24 million in restitution to defrauded investors and insurance companies.
Jordan Belfort — Stratton Oakmont
Long before Theranos and FTX, Jordan Belfort made his name selling stocks.
Belfort founded Stratton Oakmont, a brokerage firm that operated what regulators described as a boiler room, where salespeople used high-pressure tactics to sell speculative over-the-counter securities.
The SEC sued Stratton Oakmont, Belfort and other executives in 1992. The agency alleged that the firm used fraudulent sales practices and manipulated the market for Nova Capital stock. It said Stratton had earned about $11 million from that manipulation.
Belfort pleaded guilty to securities fraud and money laundering. Prosecutors said the broader scheme ran from roughly 1990 to 1997 and involved the manipulation of at least 34 initial public offerings. Contemporary reporting said the additional charges put the amount of money involved in the laundering scheme at at least $80 million.
Belfort cooperated with investigators and testified against people involved in the scheme.
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A federal court later sentenced him to 42 months in prison and ordered him to pay $100.4 million in restitution, according to a retrospective published by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. He ultimately served about 22 months.
Most people know Belfort through The Wolf of Wall Street, the memoir he wrote after prison and the 2013 Martin Scorsese film based on it.
The real case, however, was about securities fraud and money laundering. The SEC had already described Stratton Oakmont as a boiler-room operation years before the Hollywood version of Belfort’s story reached theaters.
Sumit Rai — Onco Filtration and Cancer Check Labs
Sumit Rai’s case is the most recent one on this list, and it also requires a different description because he has not been convicted in a criminal case.
In January 2026, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil fraud case against Rai, several companies he controlled and another individual. The SEC alleges that Rai and his companies misrepresented their businesses to investors and misappropriated at least $10.6 million in investor funds.
The companies included Onco Filtration and Cancer Check Labs.
According to the SEC’s complaint, Rai told investors that his primary business involved developing a method and device that could remove circulating tumor cells from a patient’s bloodstream. Investors were told that their money would help pay for research, development and clinical trials needed for regulatory approval in the United States and Europe.
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The SEC alleges that much of the money went elsewhere.
Its complaint says at least $2.3 million went toward Rai’s personal credit-card debt. It also alleges that at least $1 million went toward unrelated debts, that $850,000 was used to purchase luxury vehicles for an “elite social club” Rai tried to establish, and that about $5.1 million was withdrawn in cash.
The SEC is seeking injunctions, disgorgement, civil penalties and restrictions on Rai’s future participation in the securities industry.
Those are allegations in a civil enforcement action, not findings from a criminal conviction. That distinction matters here.
The case is also a reminder of why a company’s scientific pitch and its actual financial records have to be examined separately. A business can present investors with an impressive medical concept while the question of where the investment money goes remains a completely different one.
