Juan Francisco Ramirez, 60, of Miami, used the bank he chaired to fund his own investments, mortgages and credit card bills, and on Oct. 7 a federal judge in the Southern District of Florida sentenced him to 62 months in prison. Prosecutors say the scheme cost Nodus International Bank at least $23,613,371. Ramirez, the former…

Letters dated September 18 are telling millions of people with ties to the U.S. military that unauthorized users got into a Pentagon personnel system and reached files holding their Social Security numbers. About 2.76 million living people are affected, along with roughly 294,000 who have died, according to FEDweek’s report on the notices. Affiliate links…

The case began with someone who coded patient diagnoses for a living. Donna Irons, a former risk adjustment coder at AIDS Healthcare Foundation, is the whistleblower behind a False Claims Act lawsuit that ended Oct. 6 with the Los Angeles nonprofit agreeing to pay $1.44 million, the Justice Department said. The government alleges that AHF…

Agents who searched a Virginia home in May say they found 298 gold bars. On Oct. 6, the man who lived there, David J. Rush, 49, of Ashburn, pleaded guilty in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia to executing a scheme to defraud the federal government, the Justice Department announced. Prosecutors say Rush…

Eighty-six accounts, one Miami commercial address, and a bank employee who was being paid on the side. That is how federal prosecutors describe the case against Gerardo Aquino, 40, of Hollywood, Florida, a former TD Bank employee who pleaded guilty on Oct. 6 in federal court in New Jersey, according to the Justice Department. Aquino…

The Office of Personnel Management and the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud say anti-fraud work saved the federal government’s two employee health programs more than $500 million in 2025. The programs are the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, or FEHB, and the Postal Service Health Benefits Program, or PSHB. The figure is OPM’s…

To keep receiving her son’s disability benefits after he left her custody, a Michigan mother lied to the Social Security Administration about where he lived, and even had another person impersonate him during an SSA review, according to the Justice Department. She is Keshaune Pace, also known as Keshaune Jenkins, and the department says she…

Seventeen people now face federal charges in a month-long Justice Department sweep of Social Security benefit theft, and the biggest case on the list belongs to Lizbeth A. Reinhard of the Northern District of Ohio, whose entry carries an intended loss of $170,166. The department announced the cases on September 29, 2026. Every one of…

The indictment, as the Justice Department describes it, starts with a deep freezer in a garage. Federal prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois allege that Eva Bratcher concealed her mother’s body there for two years, taking on her mother’s identity and collecting her mother’s Social Security payments and SNAP benefits in the meantime. The…

Seventeen defendants, eleven federal districts and $1,326,330 in alleged intended loss to Social Security sit in one Justice Department tally released September 29. Prosecutors charged all 17 people between August 21 and September 18, 2026, and the department presented the group as a one-month takedown run with the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector…