---
title: "Holmes’s hundreds of millions no longer stand out: reported US fraud losses keep rising"
description: "Theranos sits near the bottom of the billion-dollar fraud table, and the measured baseline is climbing about 25% a year"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-18T11:00:00Z
modified: 2026-10-18T23:54:30Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/holmes-s-hundreds-of-millions-no-longer-stand-out-reported-u-8773e5
language: en
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Holmes’s hundreds of millions no longer stand out: reported US fraud losses keep rising

*Theranos sits near the bottom of the billion-dollar fraud table, and the measured baseline is climbing about 25% a year*

By Luis Goa · October 18, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/holmes-s-hundreds-of-millions-no-longer-stand-out-reported-u-8773e5

US consumers reported losing $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, a 25% jump over 2023’s implied $10 billion, [according to the FTC](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/03/new-ftc-data-show-big-jump-reported-losses-fraud-125-billion-2024). The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center logged $16.6 billion in losses in 2024, a record, [per its annual report](https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2024_IC3Report.pdf), and $20.9 billion in 2025, [per AARP’s account of the 2025 FBI data](https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/fbi-ftc-report-2025-losses/) — another 26%. All of these are reported losses, a floor: the FTC’s figure counts only what consumers file. Against that baseline, the crime that made Elizabeth Holmes famous — defrauding Theranos investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, for which she is three years into an 11-year federal sentence — no longer looks like an outlier. It looks like a rounding error in the trend line.

That is roughly the argument Idrees Kahloon makes [in *The Atlantic*](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/10/theranos-trump-nathan-fielder/689001/): Holmes was not so much an aberration as early. The occasion is a new documentary, *You Can See Everything*, directed by Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder. It exists because Holmes and her partner, the hotel heir Billy Evans, invited Fielder — a surrealist sketch comedian — to live with them just before she went to prison, and let him film whatever he saw. On camera, Holmes maintains that she did nothing wrong and that Theranos could have delivered what it promised. Also on camera, in the weeks before her sentence began, she and Evans were discussing a Theranos 2.0. Evans’s new company, Kahloon notes, unlike Theranos, involves lasers.

![A film projector with two reels and a blood sample vial projects a large red blood drop onto a cream beam against a blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/f580158913832e655cc00ecfc92d968bdd3986bd.webp)

What Theranos actually shipped is worth restating in engineering terms, because the gap is the fraud. The company promised hundreds of medical tests on pinprick blood samples. Its device could run only a handful of basic tests, sometimes inaccurately, and the operation secretly depended on conventional third-party analyzers — the thing the machine was supposed to replace. In unit economics terms the product was zero; the remaining asset was the story.

## The comparable-fraud table

How does hundreds of millions compare? One caveat before the numbers: the published rankings of the largest frauds mix methodologies — shareholder losses, paper balances on customer statements, and actual cash lost are three different quantities, and the compilers do not always say which column a figure belongs in. Where known, the basis is listed.

Madoff — $65B on customer account statements, including fictitious profits; actual principal lost exceeded $17B, per one case study

Enron — $74B in shareholder losses, [per a roundup of the largest accounting frauds](https://stephsbooks.com/blog/biggest-accounting-fraud-cases)

FTX — $14B to $16.5B in assets now being repaid under its reorganization plan, [per U.S. News](https://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/biggest-corporate-frauds-in-history); the outlet reports 98% of customers are slated to receive about 119% of their claims, partly because the estate’s assets appreciated while the case ran

![A tall stack of green banknotes forms an open doorway against a bright blue background, with a few coins beside it.](https://rews.cc/img/6bfd4b0778ac170b4980a16a570d9753a69fba5a.webp)

WorldCom — $11B accounting fraud (same roundup)

Wirecard — $2.1B in cash that did not exist (same roundup)

Tyco — $600M (same roundup)

Theranos — hundreds of millions defrauded from investors, per the Atlantic; 11-year sentence

Read as a table, Theranos ranks last or second-to-last depending on how you value Tyco, and the Madoff row alone shows why the basis column matters: $65B and $17B describe the same scheme, separated by the difference between what customers were told they had and what was ever paid in. Holmes’s case sits at the bottom of this list even at face value.

## The baseline is rising

The deeper point of the Atlantic piece — that Holmes’s kind of fraud has become ambient — is checkable in the complaint data. It checks out. Two series, different populations: the FTC counts fraud consumers report directly; IC3 counts internet-crime complaints filed with the FBI. They overlap but are not the same denominator, so compare each series against itself, not against each other.

![Five cream fishing hooks of increasing size rise along blue waves against a teal background, with a yellow wallet floating between them.](https://rews.cc/img/cc4fb8819e1263ff484f9070c85dd45415df9a4d.webp)

FTC consumer-reported fraud losses: 2023 ≈ $10.0B ██████████ / 2024 $12.5B ████████████▌ (+25%). The 2023 figure is implied: $12.5B is $10.0B grown by the 25% increase the FTC reports.

IC3-reported losses: 2024 $16.6B ████████████████▌ / 2025 $20.9B ████████████████████▉ (+26%). Within the 2025 total, adults 60 and over reported $7.7 billion stolen, the largest share of any age group, per AARP.

Two series, two different collection methods, and both up about a quarter year over year. Either the amount of fraud is rising at roughly that rate, or willingness to report it is, or — most plausibly — both, in proportions the data do not separate. What the numbers do not support is stability.

Holmes has about eight years left on her sentence if it runs to term. On film, in its final free weeks, the plan was already the same plan again with new hardware. The next numbers worth watching are easier to find than a sequel: the FTC and IC3 reports for 2026, which at the current growth rates would come in near $15.6 billion and $26 billion. If they do, hundreds of millions buys you even less notoriety than it did in 2018.