Category: Markets & Economy

The largest sum many families ever move at once is the wire that funds a home purchase, whether it is a down payment or the full balance due at the closing table. Criminals have built an entire playbook around intercepting that single transfer in the final hours before a sale closes. By the time a…

The money shows up in the account within a day, so the check must be good — that is the assumption a whole category of scams is built to exploit. In reality, a check a bank makes available almost immediately can be exposed as counterfeit weeks later, and when that happens the bank reverses the…

The square black-and-white code has become part of everyday life — scan it to see a menu, pay a meter, or track a package. That convenience is exactly what scammers are exploiting. A fraudulent QR code slapped over a real one, or printed on a fake notice, can send a phone straight to a counterfeit…

Losing money to a scam is bad enough. What too many older Americans learn next is that a second scammer is often waiting — one who calls, emails, or messages with news that the lost money can be recovered, for a price. It is a cruel sequel: a fresh con dressed up as rescue, aimed…

The pitch usually arrives sounding like protection, not a sales call. A voice on the phone or a host on late-night television warns that the economy is about to collapse, that inflation will gut a nest egg, and that the only safe move is to shift retirement savings into gold and silver. What often follows…

A check dropped in a blue collection box to pay the electric bill can end up rewritten and cashed for thousands of dollars by a stranger. Criminals steal mail to get at the paper checks inside, then chemically erase the name and amount written on them and fill in their own. The person who mailed…

A debit card that works perfectly at the pump can be copied before the tank is even full. Thieves attach small devices to the card readers on gas pumps and ATMs, and a single swipe is enough to lift everything needed to clone the card and start pulling cash out of the account behind it….

The paperwork arrived like clockwork. Every week or two, investors received a “Statement Report” listing their portfolio’s value and the stock trades supposedly made on their behalf. The numbers looked healthy, and the promise attached to them was reassuring: the principal was protected from loss no matter what the market did. Federal prosecutors say every…

The frauds behind this case did not target one person’s savings so much as the public programs meant to catch people when disaster or job loss hits. Fake applications for pandemic-era disaster loans, bogus unemployment claims, doctored checks, and hijacked business emails all fed money into the same laundering ring — and a North Carolina…

The victims in this case were, on average, 82 years old, and they were told they had won a prize that never existed. Over nearly seven years, at least 50 elderly Americans wired money, mailed checks, and shipped cash to men who claimed a Publishers Clearing House windfall was waiting, if only the taxes and…