Federal Jury Convicts Tech Executive in First of Its Kind COVID-19 Testing-Related Securities Fraud. He Even Lied About Being a Nobel Prize Candidate – By Meghan Cuniff (Law and Crime) / Sept 2, 2022
A federal jury in San Jose, California, has convicted a medical technology executive of 10 felonies in the first criminal securities fraud case related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mark Schena, 59, was the president of the publicly traded Arrayit Corp. in Silicon Valley when he claimed to have invented technology that could use a few drops of blood to test for diseases, including COVID-19. He described himself as the “father of microarray technology,” a revolutionary mass DNA detection tool that he said was key to his newfound testing methods, according to court documents, and he duped investors while running a kickback scheme that involved $77 million in false reimbursement claims to private insurance companies and federal programs including Medicare.
Schena “lulled” worried investors through press releases and Twitter posts with false information about lucrative partnerships with respected entitles that had agreed to use Arrayit’s technology “when in fact no such agreements existed or were of minimal value,” according to a press release from the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California.
Schena also lied that he was on the short list for the Nobel Prize, prosecutors say, and he lied that Arrayit was worth $4.5 billion with $80 million in annual revenue. Along the way, he failed to to release the company’s financial disclosures as required by the Securities Exchange Commission, and he hid the fact that it “was on the verge of bankruptcy.”
