Why did this elaborate scam work? The truth behind it is how, let's travel back to 1984 and bring you back to review this whole scam.

On February 3, 1984, a person named Elizabeth Holmes was born in the U.S. capital of Washington, D.C. Her family's conditions were very favorable, her father served as vice president of Enron, and her mother was also employed by the U.S. Congress. As a child, Holmes had ambitious aspirations - to become a billionaire.

In 2002, at the age of 18, Holmes graduated from high school and went on to Stanford University, where she majored in chemical engineering. During her time at the university, she worked as a student researcher with the dean of the College of Engineering and several PhD researchers, and her smarts and sweet looks made her a favorite in the lab.

In the second semester of her freshman year, Holmes was offered an internship at the Genome Research Center in Singapore at a time when SARS was sweeping the world. While working on the SARS virus in the lab, Holmes found that the entire process of research, experimentation, and analysis was rather traditional. This gave her some innovative ideas.

In March 2004, at the age of 20, Holmes made a bold decision to drop out of school and start her own business.

Using the money her parents had given her for her education as start-up capital, she founded a company called Real Time Therapeutics in California, renamed it Theranos after the words for therapy and diagnostics, and directed it toward the development of blood tests in the U.S.

Theranos is the world's leading provider of therapeutics and diagnostics. s growth toward the blood testing market in the United States.

According to her, the idea for the company came from her own fear of needles, so she wanted to develop a technology that would allow hundreds of tests to be performed using only a tiny amount of blood from her fingertips.

Holmes, who became the owner, is constantly in the public **** to preach her own unique ideas and some pie-in-the-sky ways of getting medical care. Among them was the notion that "test kit = reader", which simply meant that a small amount of a patient's blood could be used to produce multiple test results.

Not surprisingly, this concept raised $6 million in 2004, with the first $1 million coming from Tim Draper, founder of DeFontaine Ventures, and the company was valued at $30 million at that point.

In 2005, Hilaros built a prototype based on a previous idea, called Hilaros 1.0. Since R&D consumes a lot of money, it didn't take long for Holmes to embark on a second and third round of funding, securing $9 million and $32 million respectively, and the company's valuation rose to $197 million.

With money in hand, in September 2007, the company improved its first-generation prototype and retrofitted the old device with a robotic hand to avoid the problem of blood and reagents contaminating each other. The upgraded device was dubbed "Edison".

The device claimed that by collecting a few drops of a patient's blood, a 240-item test result could be obtained four hours later. But the truth is that the device is quite problematic, and the test tubes for the tests often rupture while the machine is running. When too few blood samples were tested, the machine resorted to diluting the blood heavily resulting in inaccurate results.

But in the trend of huge profits, these are not the point, Holmes instead acted more high-profile, claiming to be an admirer of Apple founder Steve Jobs, and also recruited a lot of Apple employees, and in most of the public appearances, deliberately imitated Jobs, wearing a black turtleneck, and new product information only when the new product conference will be is announced. She also used a heavy baritone voice to speak and shouted out a series of beautiful slogans:

In terms of making PPTs, Holmes was no match for Jia Yueting, and she relied on those PPTs to bring the company to the top of the capital markets, where it received a great deal of attention. Over the next few years, Hobbs was favored by more investment firms for her PPT presentations.

By the end of 2010, Hilarious had more than $92 million in venture capital funding, and its market capitalization had climbed to $1 billion.

In July 2011, Holmes was introduced to former Secretary of State George Shultz. After a two-hour meeting, Schultz decided to join the company's board of directors, and over the next three years, Holmes assembled "the most distinguished board of directors in the history of corporate America" The board included a former secretary of state, a former secretary of defense, a former senator, and other big names of prominence.

In the United States, the market for traditional blood testing is huge. The annual cost of blood testing up to more than 75 billion dollars, but basically by the "U.S. Holdings Laboratories" and "Quest Diagnostics" monopoly, the two companies in the market share has reached more than 60%, but Holmes hard by virtue of its strong board of directors background began to seize the market. But Holmes, with his strong board of directors, began to capture market share.

In 2013, Walgreens, the world's largest food and drug retailer with more than 4,000 stores, announced a partnership with Hilaros. This cooperation is undoubtedly the biggest affirmation of Hilaros, and other healthcare organizations have also approached Hilaros in the hope of being able to take advantage of this big leg.

At this point, Holmes was on a mission to change the healthcare industry the way Steve Jobs changed the cell phone

In the future, there will be a Hilarious Wellness Center every 5 miles in the United States.

This vision, coupled with "the most distinguished board of directors in the history of corporate America," led to more investment in Holmes, which has totaled more than $400 million.

In 2014, Hilarious was valued at more than $9 billion, making it a "Silicon Valley star company" with more than 500 employees. Holmes, the founder, owned 50% of the company and was worth more than $4.5 billion. That year, Forbes ranked Hilaros 110th among the top 500 companies. The media's attention on her reached its peak, and Holmes frequently appeared on the cover of Fortune, Forbes, Time and many other famous magazines, and participated in a variety of high-end programs, and Jack Ma once shared the stage with Holmes, and exchanged views on the topic of "doing good".

At the end of 2014, Holmes' name appeared in 18 US patents and 66 foreign patents, and she was named a fellow of Harvard Medical School and one of the "most influential people in the world" by Time magazine.

Hilarius and Walgreens agreed to a blood-testing service that has been delayed, and even when it was launched under intense pressure, the program has been plagued by problems. The so-called "Edison" blood-testing equipment either didn't work or the results were far from the real thing.

In order to deal with investors, organizations, and patients, Holmes has gone through a lot of trouble:

Holmes asked the company's employees must be extremely loyal, not only to sign a confidentiality agreement before joining, and are not allowed to inquire about things other than their own work, but also the implementation of a strict grouping of employees, which led to a lot of employees only know what their own team is doing, and other things. The company's main goal is to provide the best possible service to its customers.

In fact, in 2007, former employees of the company went on record as saying there were problems with the company's blood-testing technology, but were screwed out of their money by a team of top lawyers hired by the company, and while negative press like that was quickly squashed with strong backroom support from the board of directors, the giant ship in the ocean that Holmes had cobbled together with lie after lie would eventually fizzle out.

In 2015, John Carew, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Wall Street Journal, received word from a professional medical expert that Hilaros had engaged in falsification and exaggeration of facts, and he launched an investigation that lasted months into the company. Holmes, upon learning of this, used his company's contacts to pressure John, but John plugged his career and Holmes.

On October 15, 2015, after collecting enough evidence, John published an investigative article in the Wall Street Journal titled "Hilaros Faces Difficulties with Its Blood Testing Technology," which was published and completely exposed the shocking scam behind Holmes.

The article cites testimonies and evidence from a number of former Hilaros employees and users, including a senior Hilaros employee who said that the company's "Edison" testing device was only able to perform 15 blood tests until December 2014, a huge gap between the 240 tests Holmes claimed to have performed, and that the blood testing device was not capable of performing the 15 tests. The blood test device is designed to dilute the collected blood heavily before testing, which results in extremely inaccurate results. This makes the test results extremely inaccurate. What's even more dramatic is that the vast majority of blood tests are performed by users who have purchased traditional blood testing equipment from other companies, which is the ultimate in duplicity.

The night after the scandal was reported in the Wall Street Journal, Holmes appeared on the nationally-known program Mad Money, and when the host of the program mentioned it to her, she responded:

Although Holmes fired back in the language of success, U.S. authorities launched an investigation into her company. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that there were irregularities in the laboratory staff's operating procedures, the design and quality of the testing equipment, and that the company, from its inception to the present, had not established a control system for internal quality audits, nor did it have any relevant regulations to control the progress of internal quality audits. This is a stone that stirred up a thousand waves.

In July 2016, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, officially banned Holmes from operating blood testing services for two years. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also ordered the company, to stop using its invention of nanotubes for blood collection devices. Drugstore chain giant Walgreens also announced the termination of its relationship with Hilaros and the closure of its in-store blood collection centers.

In 2017, the state of Arizona filed a lawsuit against Hilaros, claiming that the company had sold 1.5 million fraudulent blood tests to Arizonans. In the lawsuit, Holmes agreed to refund the cost of the tests to those tested, which, along with civil court costs and attorney's fees, cost a total of $4.65 million.

In May 2017, creditors came calling, and Forbes updated the valuation of Holmes' assets, from $4.5 billion to worthless. Fortune magazine also called Holmes "the world's most disappointing leader, and then the SEC stepped in to investigate, ultimately finding that the company had defrauded investors.

To resolve the lawsuit, Holmes relinquished voting control of Hilaros, was banned from holding senior positions in public companies for the next ten years, fined $500,000, and risked jail time. Hilaros initiated dissolution bankruptcy proceedings, with the remaining cash and assets to be distributed to creditors. Thus, the "star company", once valued at more than $9 billion, went down the drain.

On June 15, 2018, a federal grand jury indicted Holmes and the company's president, Mesh Balwani, on nine counts after a two-year investigation by U.S. police.