I think there’s an element of this. She may actually have believed her own lies. At any rate, it’s hard to be sure.
Still, I’m glad she got a nice long prison sentence. She deserves it.
She definitely deserves the long sentence, but still that’s nothing when compared to the lives she ruined. See: Ian Gibbons.
She’s an evil bitch.
Plus, those machines actually got used, and there are people whose medical care was messed up by the false results. I bet some of them died, too, although it’s hard to prove.
Additionally, when those erroneous lab values were reported for real patients, real people, the health care decisions for them were redirected as a result of those lab values. Again it is hard to prove that but I’m convinced that happened.
that changes, once the cheque clears …
I notice the Wikipedia article on the case says this:
This supports what I’ve speculated before, that not only at the beginning, but through the end, up to even the end of the trial, she wasn’t consciously committing fraud; rather, she genuinely thought the idea for this technology was such a great idea that if she just kept pushing for it, she could “manifest” it into existence The Secret-style.
So, what, she was actually innocent, and was being duped?
This is one of the unusual characteristics of fraud as a criminal offence. People can intentionally do all the acts that amount to fraud, but don’t think that they have committed fraud. The courts judge them by their intentional acts; the fact that they don’t think it’s fraud is irrelevant.
ETA: That’s the way it is in Canada, at least. Here’s a link to the leading case:
There, the fraudster took money on deposit for houses to be built. He honestly, really, thought the money would be paid back when the hourses got built, so he couldn’t be guilty of fraud, right? His heart was pure and all that.
Supreme Court of Canada: “Get real!”
With some fraudsters, the first person they deceive is themself.
No, what @Northern_Piper said.
I’ve gotten the same reaction before and I’m not sure why this is so hard to understand. I didn’t say she was innocent. She committed fraud, and it’s right that she was found guilty. I just don’t know why some people are so invested in this idea that behind closed doors, she must have been rubbing her hands together and cackling with glee over her dastardly plot to deliberately steal money while deliberately lying about biotechnology, when it’s so obvious the truth is that she was delusional.
Nope.
IMO she was totally and deliberately committing fraud. As a psychopath she was able to lie convincingly enough to persuade those jurors she believed this crap about the tech working. And they in turn believed her crap. She was totally perjuring herself on the stand. But because she was such a good liar, a bit like Trump, she was able to sound sincere while laughing internally the whole time.
That could well be; I don’t know enough about the case to comment.
I’m not saying this personal denial is the pattern with all fraudsters; some know exactly what they’re doing.
It’s just that the self-deceit is not unknown among certain fraudsters.
So what do you think she thought the end point was?
Keep the money train going in perpetuity, I suppose. Many times, these people don’t have an “end game”, they just try desperately to keep the game going.
I can’t speak for @LSLGuy but I think people in that situation are just in crisis mode, jumping from plate to plate trying to keep them all spinning.
There was a guy in Salt Lake City who shot his wife because she had found out he had lied about being accepted into medical school, had lied about graduating from the University of Utah and everything else that went along with it. They were in the process of moving to North Carolina where he was supposedly accepted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He threw her body into a dumpster, and made up some story about her disappearing on a jog through a mountain park.
(I was actually visiting my mother at the time and she got a call from someone at my mom’s church where they also attended, looking for volunteers that morning to search the mountain.)
Any reasonable person would have to know that you can’t keep lying about becoming a doctor. It will eventually implode so there has to be some sort of major denial doing on or they would go crazy.
There was the guy who “discovered” new chemical elements by (amateurishly) fabricating data. Since it was all bullshit, he was quickly discovered as soon as someone bothered to analyse the data. Perhaps he was fantasizing no one would ever bother? (Except that people expect reproducible results, not your word that you got some results.)
Yes, this.
She may well not have started as a conman. But just as a get-rich-quick CEO wannabe with some friends with some money and some other friends with ideas she was not competent to evaluate. Certainly other informed folks think she had to either be criminal-level stupid, or to have understood from the git-go that the tech was inherently deeply utterly hopeless: pure smoke and mirrors. Speaking just for me, I honestly don’t know the deep backstory well enough to offer a solid opinion between those two poles.
Once the biz promotion effort gets going though, it’s easy to both believe your own BS and to believe that the rubes deserve to be fleeced, so you’re not doing wrong.
In the later stages, to the degree you’re rational at all, you recognize you’re now riding a tiger. Bernie Madoff got there, as did a famous now imprisoned book-cooking Indian tycoon whose name escapes me just now. They knew they were in deep in a hole and still digging like mad. But continuing to dig, and dig ever-faster, was the seemingly least-bad alternative on offer. At least seemingly least-bad for their own personal narrow interests, not necessarily those of the larger constituency a CEO supposedly represents.
Optimistic mostly legit start-up business shades to unrealistically optimistic business promotion idea shades to a funding round pyramid scheme shades to a con working marvelously shades to a con working with cracks showing shades to a house of cards unraveling before your eyes despite your best efforts shades to a total crash and burn. Each day is not much different than yesterday, but the whole story arc involves a ginormous change of course.
Honest people pull the plug (or bail out) at phase 1.5, not keep doubling down until they’re in jail after phase 6.
I’m agnostic. She might be a psychopath or she might be delusional. Either way, It’s a good thing she’s in prison, and not perpetrating this fraud.
That certainly was how it looked from the book. They said she banned the software developers from communicating with the engineers. THERE IS NO WAY THE DEVICE COULD EVER WORK if the programmers aren’t talking to the engineers. There has to be back-and-forth to get things to work.
Like hiring a wet nurse? What motherly duties are you talking about?
Reading Mommy Is a Lying Liar Who Burned Through Almost a Billion Dollars and May Have Killed Some Sick Folks with the kids at bedtime?