Biotech CEO Sentenced To 7 Years In Prison For $28-M Fraud

The CEO of a California biotech company, Decision Diagnostics, claimed to have a finger-prick test that could detect COVID-19 and used multiple fake identities to pump up the company’s stock price, authorities said, as reported by Amanda Gerut for Fortune.

Berman’s case is similar to that of Elizabeth Holmes, who dropped out of Stanford and organized the blood testing startup Theranos in 2003. I Image: Decision Diagnostics Corp.

The CEO, Keith Berman, was sentenced on Friday to seven years in prison for the fraud that led to $28 million in investor losses, according to the Department of Justice.

Berman’s case is similar to that of Elizabeth Holmes, who dropped out of Stanford and organized the blood testing startup Theranos in 2003.

Holmes played the market, but her enterprise turned out to be a huge fraud that catapulted her to the Billionaires List of Bloomberg, only to fall back to earth penniless. She was sentenced last year to serve 135 months in prison for fraud, as reported by The Guardian, Reuters, and Business Insider.