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.
Adrian Lawrence, a Jamaican national who operated under the alias “Mastermind,” was sentenced to 66 months in federal prison for running a sweepstakes fraud scheme that stole millions from elderly victims across the United States. U.S. District Judge Joan M. Azrack imposed the sentence in Central Islip and ordered Lawrence to pay $5.4 million in…
Troy Murray, a 57-year-old from Hickory, North Carolina, was sentenced to 121 months in federal prison for selling the personal information of more than 7 million elderly Americans to scammers based in Jamaica. The scheme ran from 2016 through 2023, and the stolen data fed fraud operations that caused more than $9 million in losses….
More than 380 people put money into a crypto-mining operation that claimed it would generate returns through digital-asset mining packages. The Securities and Exchange Commission now says the firm behind those promises, Bright Vision Distribution LLC doing business as Mining Automatic, funneled only about 13 percent of the roughly $22 million it collected toward anything…
Federal prosecutors in Washington state filed a civil action to seize $7.1 million in cryptocurrency tied to an alleged $97 million oil-and-gas investment fraud that targeted victims over a two-year span. The filing, brought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington, follows the indictment of a Seattle-area resident on money-laundering charges…
Bradley Heppner, founder of the investment firm Beneficient, fabricated a $141 million debt that the company supposedly owed to a shell entity he secretly controlled, then used that fictional obligation to divert funds from publicly traded GWG Holdings, federal prosecutors say. A jury convicted Heppner of fraud in the case filed as US v. Heppner,…
A federal judge sentenced exiled Chinese businessman Miles Guo to 30 years in prison on June 29, 2026, for orchestrating a fraud that solicited more than $1 billion from thousands of investors. The sentence also strips Guo of a $26.5 million New Jersey mansion, a Bugatti, a Lamborghini, a Rolls Royce Phantom, and a yacht,…
Rossen G. Iossifov, already serving a federal prison sentence for laundering millions of dollars through an international cyber fraud scheme, now faces fresh criminal charges for allegedly stealing approximately $290,000 in cryptocurrency that had been forfeited to compensate the very victims he helped defraud. The forfeited crypto sat in an account registered to Iossifov at…
People who lost money in a six-year investment fraud scheme tied to a Wausau, Wisconsin, man may soon recover a fraction of their losses through a federal online auction of seized cars and jewelry set to begin July 28. Stanley Pophal pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering for a scheme that ran from…
Victims of so-called pig-butchering investment scams lost more than $225 million in cryptocurrency that federal agents have now frozen, the largest single recovery the Justice Department has ever made from crypto confidence fraud. The civil forfeiture complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, targets exactly 225,364,961 USDT held across a network…
Christopher Alexander Delgado, a 34-year-old cryptocurrency executive from Apopka, Florida, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering after running a scheme through his company Goliath Ventures that took in at least $400 million from investors and caused at least $250 million in losses. According to a detailed announcement from…