Federal prosecutors obtained felony charges against nearly 80 defendants during a summer crackdown on fraud in the Small Business Administration’s COVID-era loan programs, the Justice Department said September 14. The effort, called Operation No Doze, ran from June 12 through September 1 and involved more than 40 U.S. Attorney’s Offices. DOJ said the newly charged…

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services canceled approximately 315,000 unauthorized enrollments in the federal health insurance Marketplace, a move that affected more than 760,000 people. The agency said on September 22 that the cancellations, which took effect August 31, 2026, are expected to return roughly $2.2 billion in taxpayer-funded premium subsidies. CMS paired the…

Most tax scams borrow the name of something real. This one borrows the name of something that was never enacted at all. The Internal Revenue Service has issued a public warning about promoters selling what they call Tribal Tax Credits, telling taxpayers, tribal communities, businesses and tax professionals that no such federal credit exists and…

A federal judge in White Plains, New York, closed the books on a sweepstakes operation that spent a decade working the same trick on retirees: call a stranger, tell them they had already won, and collect the “fees” before any prize could ship. The scheme ran phone banks and text campaigns out of Jamaica for…

A joint enforcement action by the Federal Trade Commission and the Washington state attorney general has produced the largest monetary settlement the FTC says it has ever obtained against a multilevel marketing company. Amway Corp. and two of its recruiting affiliates would pay $225 million under a proposed federal court order, with nearly all of…

The Federal Trade Commission has put a specific date on its next public warning about Medicare fraud. On September 29, the agency will host a one-hour virtual roundtable built entirely around the con artists who work the open enrollment calendar — the weeks before, during and after older adults and their families sort out next…

A refund program touching millions of Amazon customers is entering a new phase, and fraud watchers expect the payout news itself to become the next scam script. On September 17, 2026, the Federal Trade Commission used its own announcement about expanded Amazon Prime settlement payments to add an unusual line: the agency does not contact…

Federal prosecutors in Atlanta filed a civil fraud complaint on September 17, 2026, accusing two former executives of a Georgia clinical laboratory of causing Medicare to pay roughly $13.7 million for genetic and respiratory tests that were solicited at church health fairs, religious conferences and senior living communities rather than ordered by a treating doctor.…

Thousands of SNAP households who watched their monthly grocery money vanish to a card-skimming scheme built their recovery plan around a federal repayment rule that quietly expired in December 2024. Congress has not brought that authority back since, which means anyone skimmed after that date is depending on whatever their own state chooses to do,…

A profile picture built around the agency’s own eagle seal, a fabricated case number, and a link promising a stalled refund: that is the anatomy of the fake account the Internal Revenue Service says it has been tracking by the hundreds. In its newest annual scam list, the agency counted more than 600 social media…