Category: Fraud and Crackdowns

Americans age 60 and older lost $4.35 billion to cryptocurrency scams last year, and investigators say a growing share of that money left victims’ hands through the cash-to-crypto kiosks now bolted to the walls of gas stations, convenience stores, and grocery aisles. The machines look like ordinary bank ATMs, but they convert cash into digital…

Federal prosecutors say a single network of companies and clinicians billed Medicare more than $4 billion for skin grafts that were marked up roughly 2,000 percent, then paid kickbacks to make sure the costly patches kept getting applied to older patients. The allegations sit at the center of the Justice Department’s 2026 national health-care fraud…

An older woman in Hawaii handed nine gold bars worth more than $137,000 to a stranger who arrived at her home claiming to carry the authority of the federal government, and prosecutors say the scheme was only getting started. The same operation, according to the Justice Department, pressed her to pull $429,000 out of a…

A federal jury convicted 25 defendants on April 24, 2026, for running an international business email compromise operation that stole roughly $215 million from more than 1,000 victims spread across 47 states and 19 countries. The case, prosecuted out of the Northern District of Ohio, stands as one of the largest BEC prosecutions by defendant…

A married couple who funneled $1.4 million stolen largely from elderly victims in San Diego County into luxury cars abroad has been sentenced by a federal court. The pair, both Romanian citizens, admitted to laundering proceeds from jewelry grand thefts, robberies, swindles, and California pandemic unemployment fraud. As part of their plea, they agreed to…

Neil Suresh Chandran will spend the next 136 months in federal prison after a judge sentenced him and co-defendant Bryan Lee on the same day for running a fraud operation that stole tens of millions of dollars from thousands of investors between 2018 and 2022. Lee received 36 months. The two men used shell companies,…

Gary Topolewski, a 64-year-old from Northridge, California, will spend the next six and a half years in federal prison after a judge sentenced him to 78 months for a bank fraud scheme that stretched nearly a decade and drained more than $39 million from seven financial institutions. The sentence also includes three years of supervised…

More than 9,000 people who paid for facemasks and other protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic and never received what they were promised are now getting their money back. The Federal Trade Commission is mailing 9,419 checks totaling more than $672,000 to consumers who were misled by the online marketer Trend Deploy, operated by Frank…

Federal agents seized luxury cars and a mansion from Frederick Kumi, a Ghanaian national accused of orchestrating romance-investment scams that took more than $8 million from elderly victims across the United States. Kumi, who allegedly operated under the aliases Emmanuel Kojo Baah Obeng and “Abu Trica,” was extradited to face charges in the Northern District…

Hundreds of thousands of elderly Americans lost money to fake prize letters that promised winnings but delivered nothing of value. Ryan Young, a 40-year-old from Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, has pleaded guilty in connection with a mass-mailing fraud operation that ran across two separate periods, from 2011 to 2016 and again from 2019 to…