The financial news that actually matters
A cache of cryptocurrency worth more than $25 million is now frozen while federal prosecutors try to claw it back for victims of online investment and romance scams. The money was traced through the kind of long-con fraud that increasingly drains older Americans, in which a stranger builds trust over weeks or months, shows fake…
Federal prosecutors rolled out 17 fraud cases across seven Southern states this week, tying the defendants to more than $350 million in intended losses. The Justice Department presented the sweep as the first payoff from new data-sharing deals with state governments, and many of the alleged schemes hit the same benefit programs that older Americans…
Artificial intelligence has moved from a talking point to a line on layoff notices. Through the first half of 2026, U.S. employers pointed to AI as the reason for tens of thousands of announced job cuts, and the pace has held for months. For workers in their late 50s and early 60s, a job loss…
Artificial intelligence has become the most fashionable word in a scammer’s script. The pitch is tailored to the moment: a proprietary “AI trading bot” or algorithm that supposedly reads the markets faster than any human, wins nearly every trade, and turns a modest deposit into steady, hands-off income while the owner sleeps. Federal commodities regulators…
The newest twist in fraud against older Americans does not end with a wire transfer or a gift card. It ends with a stranger at the front door. Federal investigators have documented a growing scheme in which scammers convince victims to turn their savings into cash or gold bars and then hand those valuables to…
Some investment frauds are hard to spot. The prime-bank pitch is not one of them, because regulators have taken an unusually absolute position: there is no such thing as a legitimate prime-bank investment. Every program marketed under that banner, and its many offshore cousins promising secret, risk-free trading profits, is a scam. Yet the pitch…
The steady drumbeat of shuttered storefronts is not slowing down in 2026. Major retail chains across the country have announced plans to close more than 2,000 locations this year, and the broader industry count runs far higher when smaller retailers are added in. Pharmacies and grocery stores are leading the retreat, the two categories that…
Conduent, a back-office contractor that processes documents, claims and benefits paperwork for health insurers and government agencies, is now confirmed to have exposed the personal records of more than 62 million people in one of the largest data breaches ever recorded. The stolen files included Social Security numbers and medical information, the two categories that…
A certificate of deposit trades a locked term for a fixed rate, and breaking that lock early carries a cost that many savers underestimate. Pulling money out of a CD before its maturity date almost always means surrendering interest, and in some cases the penalty runs deeper than the interest earned and reduces the original…
An old debt that a collector can no longer sue over is not the same as a debt that has disappeared. Once the statute of limitations runs out, the balance becomes what the law calls time-barred, meaning a court will no longer force payment. What surprises many older Americans is how easily that protection can…