The financial news that actually matters
A record share of 401(k) participants withdrew emergency cash from their retirement accounts last year, driven in part by new penalty-free distribution rules Congress created through the SECURE 2.0 Act. The surge raises pointed questions about whether easier access to retirement savings is helping workers through genuine crises or quietly draining the accounts they will…
Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles charged 10 people with running a prescription drug fraud scheme that billed Medi-Cal nearly $270 million in just 11 months through a single Montclair, California, pharmacy. The case, built around Monte Vista Pharmacy, alleges that defendants used kickbacks and fake prescriptions to extract more than $178 million in payments from…
Married couples who sell a primary residence can shield as much as $500,000 in capital gains from federal income tax, a benefit rooted in a 1997 law and administered through IRS rules that hinge on strict ownership and residency tests. But in markets where home values have climbed sharply over the past decade, that half-million-dollar…
Scammers are sending text messages that look like IRS refund notifications, complete with QR codes that redirect recipients to fake government websites designed to harvest bank login credentials. The IRS flagged this tactic on its 2026 Dirty Dozen tax scams list, warning that fraudulent texts, emails, and direct messages now routinely impersonate the agency and…
Seven in ten U.S. homeowners report that their home insurance costs have climbed in recent years, and nearly half of that group says the increase has been steep. The figures, released by Pew Research Center on May 6, 2026, land alongside a federal review confirming that premiums in disaster-prone areas have outpaced national inflation. Together,…
Seven people who reported securities fraud to the SEC collectively received more than $28 million in awards, drawn entirely from penalties paid by the companies and individuals they helped expose. The payouts fall within a fixed statutory band of 10% to 30% of monetary sanctions collected, a range written into federal law since the Dodd-Frank…
Federal prosecutors charged 324 defendants across 50 federal districts in what the Department of Justice called the largest coordinated health care fraud takedown in its history. The schemes involved more than $14.6 billion in alleged false claims, and investigators seized over $245 million in cash, luxury vehicles, cryptocurrency, and other assets. The operation, which drew…
Homebuyers who spent the past several years losing out in frenzied bidding wars are finding something they have not seen in a long time: choice. Newly built homes are sitting on the market longer, and the supply of unsold inventory has climbed to levels not recorded since before the pandemic. The shift is giving buyers…
Ramil Ventura Palafox, the CEO of Praetorian Group International, was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison after admitting he ran a $201 million Bitcoin Ponzi scheme that defrauded more than 90,000 investors. He used their money to buy four homes in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Then, weeks before he was supposed to report…
The Internal Revenue Service stopped $7 billion in fraudulent tax refunds over the past two years, according to IRS fiscal year 2025 data. That figure represents a sharp escalation in the agency’s filtering systems designed to catch identity-theft schemes before payments leave the Treasury. But the same filters that block criminals also flag legitimate returns,…