The financial news that actually matters
The person a company trusts with its books is the same person best positioned to cook them. That uncomfortable truth ran through a federal sentencing in Arizona, where a longtime finance director was sent to prison for quietly bleeding more than $10 million out of the employer that relied on him to guard its money….
The moment a deposited check turns into spendable money in an account feels like proof the check was good. It is not. Banking law draws a sharp line between when funds become available and when a check has truly settled, and a check can be reversed long after the money appeared to be in hand….
An identity-theft victim’s hardest task is often simply proving what was stolen. The records that show which account was opened, what was ordered, and where it shipped sit inside the retailer’s systems, and getting them released can decide whether a police report goes anywhere. A federal order against Amazon has now made clear that handing…
Cash that a brokerage customer leaves uninvested does not simply sit there. It is swept into a bank deposit program that earns interest, and how much of that interest reaches the customer has become one of the most closely watched disputes in the investment industry. Oppenheimer & Co. has now agreed to pay $70 million…
When a bill comes due, most people search for the biller’s website and pay through what looks like the official channel. Federal regulators say one company built a business by inserting itself into that moment, dressing up its own service to look like the utility or lender a customer meant to pay, and quietly adding…
The price a shopper sees online may not be the same price the next person sees, and the reason could be sitting in that shopper’s own digital trail. Federal regulators have now put a name to the practice and opened a formal review of it. The Federal Trade Commission is proposing rules of the road…
A federal jury in Kansas City has convicted a Missouri woman of draining more than $66,000 in Social Security benefits meant for her mother, who was living in Cuba with dementia while the money was quietly redirected to the daughter’s own spending. The verdict, returned this week, is a stark illustration of how easily benefits…
A retirement account can be drained by an offer that sounds too good to refuse, and federal prosecutors say thousands of investors learned that the hard way. The alleged operator of a $165 million cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme has been deported from Fiji and now faces federal fraud charges in Georgia, ending a year on the…
A large flow of federal money is moving because of a Supreme Court ruling on tariffs, but very little of it is headed to ordinary households. After the justices struck down a set of import taxes, the government has been returning the duties to the businesses that paid them at the border. That is a…
Millions of Americans who bought a home in recent years may be owed a cash payment from a $120 million legal settlement, and the window to claim it closes soon. The fund resolves antitrust claims over the way real-estate commissions were set, and it covers buyers of homes that were listed on a Multiple Listing…