The financial news that actually matters
Saks Global is closing 24 department stores across the Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus brands, cutting deeper into a physical retail footprint that has been shrinking since the company filed for Chapter 11 protection earlier this year. The closures follow a period of falling revenue and a bankruptcy process that forced the parent company…
A 23-year-old courier who traveled across the United States collecting cash and gold from elderly fraud victims has been sentenced to 18 years in federal prison. Atharva Shailesh Sathawane, of India, personally took and laundered $6,615,484.66 from older Americans and attempted an additional $1,363,395.98 in fraud, bringing the total scheme value above $7 million. The…
Anyone with more than $250,000 deposited at a single FDIC-insured bank faces a straightforward risk: if that bank fails, the amount above the insurance ceiling is not guaranteed. The 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in Santa Clara, California, forced regulators to invoke emergency powers to cover uninsured depositors, but that rescue came with a…
Homeowners who paid for mortgage help that never arrived are getting money back. The Federal Trade Commission announced in June 2026 that it is mailing checks totaling more than $2.8 million to 1,821 people who were charged by a network of companies operating under names like Golden Home Services and Home Matters USA. According to…
Federal prosecutors in North Carolina seized more than $61 million in Tether cryptocurrency tied to overseas pig-butchering scam operations, marking one of the largest single crypto seizures connected to investment fraud laundering. The action, announced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina in February 2026, targeted digital wallets used to…
Workers across the United States saw their retirement savings shrink over the past year, with the average 401(k) balance dropping 4% to roughly $141,000 as a growing number of participants tapped their accounts for emergency expenses. The decline reflects a collision between persistent financial pressure on households and a retirement system that, for the first…
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged Patrick James, founder and former CEO of auto-parts maker First Brands, and his brother Edward James, a former senior executive, with orchestrating a multibillion-dollar fraud that hid the company’s true debt load from lenders and factoring firms. The indictment, unsealed on January 29, 2026, alleges the pair submitted fake or…
Millions of individual and business filers who missed a tax deadline but have otherwise stayed current will soon have their late-filing penalties wiped out without lifting a finger. The IRS announced a new program called Automatic Exemption from Penalty, or AEP, that will suppress penalty charges during return processing for anyone who filed the same…
An Alabama man who lost his entire life savings to a cryptocurrency confidence scheme has recovered $222,000 after federal agents traced and seized the stolen funds. The recovery is part of what the Department of Justice has called its largest-ever forfeiture action targeting crypto-confidence scams, a category that includes so-called pig-butchering schemes designed to build…
More than a million people who paid for so-called instant cash advances through the Brigit app are about to receive a second round of refund checks from the Federal Trade Commission. The agency is distributing 1,052,038 payments totaling more than $6.8 million, adding to the $9.8 million it sent in November 2024. Altogether, the FTC…