The financial news that actually matters
The single most useful fact an older taxpayer can hold onto about the IRS is how it does not behave. The agency does not launch a tax matter with a threatening phone call, a text or an email demanding money on the spot. That is the opening move of an impostor, not the government. Knowing…
A credit freeze is one of the few fraud defenses that is completely free, available to anyone, and hard for a thief to work around. It tells the three national credit bureaus to keep a person’s credit report locked, so a lender checking that report before approving a new loan or card sees a closed…
Millions of older Americans have picked up the phone to a recorded voice or a live caller warning that their Social Security number has been “suspended” over suspicious activity, and that they must call back or send money to fix it. The message can sound official, complete with a case number and a threat of…
Federal and state investigators say they have uncovered roughly $20 million in Medicaid fraud in South Carolina, a total prosecutors describe as the largest scheme of its kind in the state’s history. The case became public on July 30 as one piece of a broader Southeast enforcement push, but the South Carolina portion stands on…
The parent company of Raytheon and Pratt & Whitney has told an unknown number of people that criminals accessed their names, addresses and Social Security numbers. RTX Corp., one of the largest defense contractors in the country, disclosed the breach in written notices this month and reported it to state regulators. The exposed combination is…
An elaborate scam that began with a fake security warning on a home computer ended with an elderly Wisconsin woman out $135,000 and a courier headed to prison. Tao Wu, 38, was sentenced in Marathon County to two and a half years behind bars, plus five years of extended supervision, after pleading no contest to…
Precious-metals dealers spend heavily to pitch gold and silver as the one thing that will keep a retirement nest egg safe when everything else looks shaky. The metal itself is real, but the sales pitch usually is not the whole story. Federal and state regulators warn that many of these deals bury steep commissions and…
A longtime tax preparer in Bellevue, Washington, is headed to federal prison for turning other people’s returns into a fraud operation. Thanjavur Manavalan, the 65-year-old owner of Mano Accounting Services, was sentenced to 18 months behind bars, ordered to pay a $100,000 fine and told to repay tens of thousands more after a jury found…
Ernst & Young, one of the world’s largest accounting and tax firms, has begun telling clients that criminals made off with the personal records it keeps to prepare their tax returns. Those files rank among the most sensitive a household ever hands over: the Social Security numbers, financial account details and payment information that identity…
The dashboards looked convincing: real-time balances that ticked upward, the reassuring sense of an investment quietly growing. They were fabrications, part of a fake-brokerage operation that stole more than $3 million from investors in the United States. This week a federal judge sentenced one of its operators to four years in prison and ordered him…