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.
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…
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, generating lead lists that fueled fraud operations responsible for stealing more than $9 million from…
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…