On May 22, 2025, the Supreme Court endorsed the “fraudulent inducement” theory of wire fraud in Kousisis v. United States, departing from its recent trend of narrowing the scope of broadly worded criminal statutes, including the wire fraud statute. This decision appears to allow the government to obtain a conviction even where the defendant did not intend to cause economic harm to their counterparty, so long as the defendant made material false statements in order to obtain property from another. In future decisions, the Supreme Court will need to harmonize this decision with its other recent wire fraud decisions, as discussed below.
