Reported by: Daniel Van Boom Before his precipitous fall from grace, Sam Bankman-Fried was crypto’s friendly face. His persona wasn’t just for customer consumption, but was also aimed at lawmakers. He lobbied politicians across both parties with his air of technocratic competence, and tens of millions of dollars in donations. Now, months after the company […]
Reported by: NICHOLAS SAY The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) are scrutinizing Silvergate’s relationship with embattled crypto firms FTX and Alameda Research. The DoJ fraud unit is looking into Silvergate’s hosting of accounts connected to FTX and Alameda Research, according to a source familiar with the matter quoted by Bloomberg. The crypto-friendly bank plays a […]
Reported by: BOB AARON, LESLIE RUBIN The West Virginia Senate Finance Committee questioned Gov. Jim Justice’s chief counsel Friday about how $10 million in COVID-19 relief money ended up going toward construction of Marshall University’s new baseball stadium. State Auditor J.B. McCuskey, whose office raised questions via email regarding the transfer, also testified that the […]
Reported by: Mithil Aggarwal Gautam Adani rose from college dropout to become Asia’s richest man — but now he’s seen his empire rocked by a week of turmoil. The Indian tycoon has lost his title, and tens of billions in personal wealth, in a matter of days after a U.S.-based short-selling firm accused him of “the largest con […]
Reported by: Níamh Curran Criminals will always evolve and find new ways to commit the same crimes. This is something which Jodie Wilkinson, head of strategic partnerships at takepayments warns of: “Scammers are constantly updating their technology and techniques, and it’s likely that fraud will continue to become more sophisticated, meaning consumers and businesses need […]
Reported by: André Beganski OneCoin founder Dr. Ruja Ignatova has resurfaced more than five years after vanishing from the public eye, linked to a London property in a filing submitted to the British government this month. The filling lists Ignatova as a so-called beneficial owner of Abbots House Penthouse Limited, a Guernsey-based company that had purchased a […]
Reported by: ANDY GREENBERG For years, the cryptocurrency economy has been rife with black market sales, theft, ransomware, and money laundering—despite the strange fact that in that economy, practically every transaction is written into a blockchain’s permanent, unchangeable ledger. But new evidence suggests that years of advancements in blockchain tracing and crackdowns on that illicit […]
Reported by: Erik Larson The former tech entrepreneur, “Razzlekhan” rapper and accused cryptocurrency thief Heather Morgan has a new job. Morgan, who dubbed herself on social media and in music videos as “The Crocodile of Wall Street,” was hired by an unspecified technology company even though she’s under 24-hour house arrest, according to a court […]
Reported by: GRAHAM KATES Two Trump Organization companies were ordered to pay a $1.6 million fine at sentencing Friday, after a jury last month unanimously found them guilty of 17 counts related to tax fraud. The fine imposed by Judge Juan Merchan was the maximum penalty allowed in the case — double the amount of the […]
Reported by: Michael DeSantis Lawrence Isen, 69, of San Diego, California, conspired with a boiler room operation based in Melville to cost elderly investors millions of dollars, the DOJ said. From 2014 to 2016, Isen, Chartier and others working with the Melville boiler room artificially inflated the price and trading volume of stock in struggling […]
Financial Crime News Briefs 