A federal judge in the Southern District of New York sentenced Laquan Williams, 42, of Florham Park, New Jersey, to 200 months in prison on October 13, which is 16 years and 8 months. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced the sentence in a press release dated October 14.…

Javed Ashiq did not make the phone calls, according to federal prosecutors. They say the 52-year-old, who lives in Decatur, Georgia, was the courier who collected an elderly victim’s gold bars and cash and handed them to the people running the scam. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Georgia announced on October…

Xuehai Sun, 38, of Flushing, New York, has pleaded guilty in federal court in Rhode Island to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Rhode Island announced. The release says the scheme targeted seniors with fake tech-support pop-ups and phone calls, and that couriers collected cash and gold from…

A federal judge in Augusta, Georgia, has sentenced a 52-year-old Decatur man to 14 years in prison for acting as the gold-and-cash courier in a scheme that left one elderly victim with nothing. Javed Ashiq pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and was sentenced on October 7, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the…

A federal jury in Arizona found Darlene Musgrove, 68, of Tucson guilty on October 5 of 22 counts of preparing false federal income tax returns for her clients, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona announced on October 6. Twelve of her clients testified at trial that they did not have the deductions…

A law signed October 7 requires the Social Security Administration to give people whose Social Security number has been misused a single point of contact, and the requirement starts 180 days after enactment, which works out to around April 5, 2027. The measure is H.R. 5345, titled the Improving Social Security’s Service to Victims of…

Two former U.S. Postal Service clerks in New York were charged on Sept. 25, 2026, in a scheme to take gift cards out of the mail. Prosecutors say Pian Pian Wong-Tam, 59, took at least 200 of them, worth $25 to $500 each, from mail she handled at the White Plains processing center. William Wong,…

A Michigan probate court trusted TriState Guardian Services to manage the affairs of people who could not manage them. Federal prosecutors say the company’s owner, Kijuana Evans, 54, of Clinton Township, and a manager took their money. An indictment announced Oct. 1 accuses them of keeping $180,000 from the sale of a ward’s home and…

Tekiyah McLeod, 34, of Magnolia, Texas, has admitted billing Medicaid about $477,872 for mental health therapy that was never provided. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas says in its Oct. 2 announcement that McLeod pleaded guilty to health care fraud and aggravated identity theft, and that Medicaid paid her about $453,323.…

A single victim moved about $16 million in cryptocurrency to a trading platform that did not exist as described, federal prosecutors in Missouri say, in what they call a pig-butchering scam. The money went to a site called Triangle between June and August 2024, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri…