Most Social Security checks go straight to the person they belong to, but for a beneficiary judged unable to manage money, the agency appoints someone else to receive and spend them. A federal complaint now accuses one of those appointees, a Michigan woman named Laura Whisenant, of taking $121,980 from the disabled uncle whose benefits…

Americans aged 60 and older filed 201,266 complaints with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center in the 2025 data year, and the people behind them reported $7.7 billion in losses. Both numbers describe that one age group only. They sit inside a report-wide total of 1,008,597 complaints and $20.877 billion in reported losses across every…

Federal prosecutors in Albany say a Rensselaer woman spent nearly 17 years writing checks on a bank account that two government agencies kept filling after the account holder died. Kimberly Cardella, 59, is charged with taking $668,884 in total: more than $530,000 in Social Security money and more than $138,000 in New York State pension…

Two men now face federal charges over a fund that allegedly pulled in more than $8.7 million from 35 investors, with veterans singled out as the people to approach. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced its civil case on September 30, 2026, and said federal prosecutors in Manhattan had announced criminal charges over the same…

A federal court in Florida has ordered a Louisiana man and an Arkansas woman to pay $15,732,455 in restitution, or about $15.7 million, for a trading scheme called Fundsz, and the estate of a third defendant who has died is giving up his personal residence. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced the order on September…

Tomás Niembro Concha, the 64-year-old former chief executive of Nodus International Bank, was sentenced on September 21 to 112 months in federal prison, which works out to nine years and four months, followed by three years of supervised release. He pleaded guilty on March 19 to conspiring to commit wire fraud and to violating U.S.…

Scams that start on a social media feed account for a large slice of what American consumers say they lost. The Federal Trade Commission reports that nearly 30% of consumers who reported losing money to scammers in 2025 said they were first contacted on social media platforms. The figure appears in a September 24 notice…

A telephone number that looks local, a voice that claims a badge, and a demand to pay before hanging up: the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center has now counted what that script cost. Between January 2025 and July 2026 the center logged nearly 61,000 complaints involving scammers who pose as law enforcement or other officials,…

No rule holding platforms responsible for impersonation scam ads exists yet. What exists is a question. On Sept. 24 the Federal Trade Commission asked the public whether its Impersonation Rule should be updated to reach the websites and apps that carry paid ads and listings, and it opened the earliest formal stage of rulemaking to…

Federal prosecutors in Utah say a supervisor at the Agriculture Department’s inspector general office submitted paperwork declaring herself totally disabled on the same day she flew to Italy. Michelle L. Bouziden, 44, of Ogden, is accused of collecting $51,571.73 in federal workers’ compensation and of hiking more than 50 miles in the Dolomites during the…