A dealership website looks legitimate, the listed car looks real, and the price feels fair, so a buyer wires a deposit and waits for a call to come pick up the keys. Except the website was never the dealer’s. In a consumer alert published September 1, 2026, the Federal Trade Commission warned that scammers are…

The Federal Trade Commission is warning veterans and their families about postcards showing up in mailboxes nationwide that promise extra monthly benefits through something called the “Veterans Savings Program.” According to the agency, that program is not real, the postcards are not from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the entire point of the mailer…

An 83-year-old Lexington, Massachusetts, woman pleaded guilty this month to running a $10.9 million Ponzi scheme built on promissory notes she kept selling for more than a decade after state regulators had already stripped her company of the license it needed to make money. Roughly 204 investors lost their savings, and more than two dozen…

A former telephone banking consultant at Banco Popular de Puerto Rico in San Juan has been permanently barred from ever working in banking again, under a Federal Reserve Board order naming Gadiel J. Rosario-Alvarado. The Board’s own order says Rosario-Alvarado misappropriated roughly $65,747 from bank customers between 2023 and 2025 by debiting money directly from…

Medicare doesn’t just pay claims and hope they’re legitimate. It runs a growing fraud-detection operation aimed squarely at laboratories, and a case CMS disclosed at the end of August shows how far a single operator can run before that system catches up. One person, using a consulting company, enrolled 14 labs in Medicare’s fee-for-service program…

A Massachusetts woman fraudulently collected more than $110,000 in Social Security benefits, pension payments, and COVID relief checks that belonged to a dead relative, cashing 84 forged checks over nearly six years before a federal judge sentenced her to a single day in prison already served. The case, decided in federal court in Worcester, shows…

A federal grand jury in Boston has indicted a Georgian national on a money-laundering conspiracy charge connected to a durable-medical-equipment company that prosecutors say billed Medicare and other health insurers $1.3 billion in fraudulent claims over five months. The claims relied, prosecutors say, on the stolen identities of elderly and disabled Americans, many of whom…

Donnie Russell is accused of doing something federal prosecutors call especially cruel: signing a dead homeowner’s own name on a deed to take that person’s house. He is one of five people a federal grand jury in Louisville indicted on August 19, 2026, over a scheme prosecutors say went after vacant houses left behind when…

A brace shows up in the mail. Nobody in the house ordered it, no doctor ever mentioned it, and it sits in its box because no one needs it. That is not a shipping error — it is the exact scheme two Florida men just went to federal prison for running on a $34.8 million…

A call saying a timeshare has finally sold, but a “tax” or “transfer fee” needs to go out by wire before the money can be released, is the setup federal prosecutors say drove an alleged $40 million scheme. On September 1, two defendants extradited from France, Christian Felipe Rodriguez Peraza and his wife, Brenda Tamayo…