Elder fraud cost more than a million older Americans about $2 billion in 2025 alone, according to a Homeland Security Investigations official quoted in a federal indictment announcement out of Seattle. The estimate came attached to a specific case: five men accused of laundering more than $7.4 million in stolen funds taken from at least…

A caregiver in Dent County, Missouri pleaded guilty this month to stealing more than $320,000 from a client who had handed her his debit cards for one simple errand: buying groceries. Loretta Pyeatt, 52, admitted the theft played out over roughly two years while the man she cared for lived on his monthly Social Security…

Every tax season, someone tries to file a return in another person’s name and collect the refund before the real taxpayer ever gets to the mailbox. The Internal Revenue Service’s core defense against that is a free, six-digit Identity Protection PIN that only the taxpayer and the agency are supposed to know. In early September,…

The Internal Revenue Service caught nearly three times as many fraudulent tax returns filed under stolen identities this filing season as it did the year before, according to a government watchdog’s audit released in June. The agency confirmed about 19,000 returns as identity theft and kept $138.5 million in refunds from reaching thieves, as of…

A federal judge in Hammond, Indiana, sentenced a longtime local insurance agent to nearly six years in prison this month for building a fraud scheme on top of his own clients’ identities. Thomas J. Lemmen, 51, of Schererville, held a state insurance license for more than a decade before prosecutors say he used it to…

A federal court sentenced Paul Richard Randall, 67, of Orange, California, to 30 years in federal prison this month for running a pharmacy billing scheme that drained nearly $270 million from Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program. Over an eleven-month stretch, Randall’s operation billed the program for prescription pain creams and an over-the-counter vitamin dressed up as…

A federal grand jury indictment unsealed in Manhattan this month accuses the founder of a “pre-IPO” investment platform of running a five-year pricing scheme that drew more than $450 million from thousands of ordinary investors. The case, brought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, lays out in detail how…

Two founders of a Tampa-based real estate investment company have been indicted on federal charges accusing them of pocketing retirement and health-insurance money that had already been deducted from their own employees’ paychecks. Federal prosecutors say the payroll deductions kept coming out of workers’ pay, but the money stopped reaching the 401(k) plan and the…

A federal notice from the Internal Revenue Service and its Security Summit partners this month renewed a specific warning aimed at anyone who has ever worried about a stolen refund: no one from the agency will ever telephone, email or text asking for the six-digit code that keeps a tax return tied to the right…

A federal judge in White Plains sentenced Jordan Trought, a 31-year-old Jamaican national, to eight years in prison this week for leading part of an international sweepstakes fraud ring that took more than $9 million from more than 200 elderly victims across the United States. The Southern District of New York’s announcement, dated September 10,…