It would be a stretch to say there may be no better time to be a scammer, but there certainly is no better time to be into scams.
The art of the scam peaked in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, but the recent escapades of Elizabeth Holmes and Martin Shkreli, among others, have reemphasized just how much America loves the story of a good scam. Obviously the tricks are getting more complex as our society progresses, but the fact that scams continue to hurt us and provide fodder for good documentaries implies that we just aren’t learning enough from our mistakes.
Take for example the case of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. Now that we are hundreds of articles, a podcast series and a documentary removed from Holmes’ billion-dollar scam of investors and patients, it is remarkably clear that the general public is thirsting for the next healthcare silver bullet. There is no shame in trying to find the next thing that will improve our quality of life, but all the postmortem on Theranos indicates we as a society still jump the gun whenever the newest end-all for healthcare comes about.
Jonah Baker | Argonaut
Holmes had a grand vision for something that would be as revolutionary as the telephone itself. With a name reflective of such lofty ambitions, Theranos welcomed investors in with the supposed ingenuity of the Edison, a device that could run hundreds of tests with a noninvasive pinprick of blood. Rarely considering the leaps in technology that would be required for such a device, investors plugged millions into Holmes’ scheme to the point that the Edison actually made it into practical use. Complete with dangerously inconclusive results, hundreds of patients trusted the device to give them critical information that was just not possible with Theranos’ “technology.” Holmes eventually faced the music and is nowhere close to the Silicon Valley wunderkind that she used to be, but why do we continue to fall for scams like these?
Scams have come a long ways from the days of Bernie Madoff and Jordan Belfort. Although our regulatory agencies may not be the best at pro-action, they do a commendable job of trying to make sure the same mistakes don’t happen twice.
Madoff’s Ponzi scheme has had no rivals in the years since its discovery in late 2008, and instead our more modern “scam” comes from better intentions gone awry.
Holmes’ vision was never going to come to fruition, as was made clear by plenty of Theranos defectors that were profiled in ABC’s documentary, “The Dropout.” In this case, it was the wealthy elite that got Theranos off the ground and allowed her company to sell the dream to the general public. From a regular person’s perspective, why wouldn’t you want access to technology that took an invasive and cumbersome process like blood drawing and made it cheap and accessible? Why wouldn’t you want to believe that the next face of human innovation was a young woman? These are exactly the sentiments that Theranos and investors were betting on, and it worked for years until the results finally started to come in.
In this case, it was the powers that be that failed the public and allowed many patients to fall into a dangerous scheme that put their health at risk.
Theranos’ technology never should have made it out of research and development, and even there it was failing. The possibilities of growth and profit were far too great to pass up, and people were hurt as a result.
The scams of today capitalize on our faith in systems within capitalism that should protect us from fraud like Theranos. That is a far cry from the far more personal frauds that ravaged life savings and families earlier in the century, and just like it took a considerable amount of time for us to understand how to identify and weed out those scams, long cons like Theranos will require extremely careful reflection to ensure that such things don’t happen again.
Jonah Baker can be reached at arg-opinion.uidaho.edu or Twitter @jonahpbaker