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.
Eleven people, led by defendant Hua Wang, have pleaded guilty in a $65 million fraud ring that tricked thousands of older Americans into mailing cash to rental homes for fake investments. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California announced the guilty pleas, with $64 million in losses tied to Wang alone. The…
Twenty-two buyers paid full price for Rolex watches they never received, losing a combined total of nearly $1.5 million to a Southern California jeweler who allegedly collected wire transfers for years without delivering the timepieces. California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced felony charges against the jeweler, whose alleged fraud stretched across Orange and Los Angeles…
Ruthia He, founder and former CEO of Done Global, was sentenced to 72 months in federal prison and fined $1 million for running a scheme that distributed more than 37 million pills of Adderall through a telemedicine subscription model. The case, docketed as 3:24-CR-329 in the Northern District of California, represents the Justice Department’s first…
Adrian Lawrence, a Jamaican national who went by the alias “Mastermind,” has been sentenced to 66 months in federal prison for orchestrating a sweepstakes fraud scheme that stole more than $5.6 million from at least 50 elderly victims whose average age was roughly 82. A federal judge also ordered Lawrence to pay $5.4 million in…
Henry Abdo, a Lebanese national living in Miami, was sentenced to 168 months in federal prison for running a Ponzi scheme through his company, Titanium Capital LLC, that promised everyday investors guaranteed returns from a foreign-exchange trading platform. The platform did not operate as described. Instead, new investor deposits were cycled to pay earlier participants,…
Reinaldo Miralles Gonzalez of Doral, Florida, was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison for his role in a fraud ring that impersonated FBI agents to intimidate and steal from victims, many of them elderly. Gonzalez was also ordered to pay $123,000 in restitution after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud. The case…
More than 2,000 elderly Americans lost a combined $27 million to a fraud ring that used fake tech-support calls, bank impersonation, and government impersonation scams to trick victims into mailing cash or wiring money. The man who ran the operation, a Chinese national named Zhao Wang, also known as “Oscar,” was sentenced to 151 months…
Fraud losses reported by Americans aged 60 and older reached $2.46 billion last year, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s annual report to Congress on protecting older consumers. That figure almost certainly understates the real toll because many victims never file a complaint. Impersonation scams, in which callers pose as government agents or bank officials,…
Five people received federal prison sentences for draining the bank accounts of elderly retired Florida school district employees, acting as domestic links in a fraud operation directed by overseas scammers. The defendants exploited a retirement specialist’s access to personal data, faxed fraudulent withdrawal forms, and funneled roughly $1,000,000 in stolen funds through personal and business…
More than a million small stock trades executed by five of the country’s best-known brokerages carried commissions so high that regulators across dozens of states stepped in to force refunds. LPL Financial, Edward Jones, Raymond James, Ameriprise Financial, and Osaic (formerly known as Advisor Group) have agreed to return approximately $19 million to investors nationwide…