The financial news that actually matters
Covers financial scams, fraud cases, regulatory enforcement actions, and government crackdowns on illegal financial activity. It educates readers on financial safety and risk prevention.
The Villages Health System, a large medical provider group serving the retirement community of The Villages, Florida, has agreed to pay $541.5 million to resolve federal allegations that it submitted false diagnosis codes to inflate Medicare Advantage payments. The Justice Department stresses the claims are allegations only, with no finding of liability, but the size…
The Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from 22 states sued Amazon on August 31, alleging the company secretly rigged its advertising auctions for more than seven years, overcharging roughly 1.2 million sellers and brands by more than $20 billion. Millions of the retirees and near-retirees who read this site shop on Amazon almost daily,…
The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged two former executives of a Bay Area private lending firm with running a Ponzi-style scheme that pulled in more than $80 million from roughly 190 investors, many of them retired. The case is a reminder that a fund promising steady returns from real estate loans can still be…
A caller claims to be from the Social Security Administration, the IRS, or Medicare and says money is owed, or worse, that benefits are about to be suspended or an arrest is coming, unless payment arrives immediately. The one detail that gives the scam away every time is how the caller wants to be paid….
A caller says a grandchild is in trouble, hurt, arrested, or stranded, and needs money sent right away. The voice on the line sounds exactly right, right down to the pauses and the way that grandchild laughs. It may not be a coincidence. The Federal Trade Commission has warned that scammers can now clone a…
A federal jury in Washington, D.C. convicted a Maryland woman last month of draining more than $100,000 from her elderly grandmother’s bank accounts and redirecting over $21,000 of the older woman’s Social Security benefits while serving as her court-appointed guardian. The case is a reminder that guardianship arrangements, designed to protect people who can no…
A federal consumer protection rule sets a hard ceiling on how much a bank can charge a customer for someone else’s fraud on a debit card, but the ceiling only holds if the loss gets reported fast. Under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act and its implementing rule, Regulation E, the size of that ceiling depends…
Every year, thousands of paper checks disappear between the mailbox and the bank, only to resurface with a different name and a different dollar amount written across the same piece of paper. Federal investigators call the scheme check washing, and it turns an ordinary bill payment or rent check into a blank canvas for a…
Property records across the country are being altered by criminals who never set foot inside a courthouse. Using a name, a signature, and a notary stamp that do not belong to them, fraud rings file forged deeds that quietly move ownership of paid-off homes into their own control. The scheme often goes undetected for months,…
A federal judge in Puerto Rico sentenced a Houston, Texas man to nearly eight years in prison this week for laundering more than $3.1 million stolen from business-email-compromise, romance, and unemployment-insurance fraud schemes. Prosecutors say Oluwasegun Baiyewu ran the laundering side of a scam network that turned stolen cash into used cars, then shipped those…
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