The fraud part, which also happens to have been the illegal part, is that he misrepresented the size of the situation while soliciting investments. It might eventually have been true, but was specifically not true at the time he made the statements he made.

That said, I agree that my analogy was bad, and I wasn't trying to assert that Shkrelli deliberately set the house on fire as much as I was just looking for an appropriate analogy of something that is illegal even though it did not have any financial damages.

The point was that while damages from fraud may be financial, the fraud is the damage, and the lie is the crime.