The SEC says a Los Angeles M&A attorney and a Long Island trader ran a leak pipeline out of global law firms for six years, turning client confidences into trades. Twenty-one defendants. Twelve-plus deals. Two fugitives.
For nearly nine years, an Orlando plastering company sold a paper promise to hundreds of subcontractors: insurance certificates that looked real and a payroll channel that ran in cash. On May 6, 2026, a federal judge put numbers on what it cost.
Warith Deen Muhammad sold a precious metals trade that paid 5 to 10 percent in thirty days. Federal prosecutors say the gold was a story and the investors were the inventory. On Wednesday he was sentenced to four years and two months.
John Robert Leake pitched gold mines in Ghana and villas in Costa Rica. Six investors gave him roughly $8.1 million. Federal prosecutors are now asking a California court to garnish the NFL benefits he earned as a linebacker to pay back what the court says he stole.
A Belleville tax preparer admitted in federal court this week to filing hundreds of false returns, hiding six figures of her own income while inflating her clients' deductions. The clients who trusted her with their most private numbers may now owe the government money they were told they had already handled.
David Vernon Lott told investors his Missouri Holding Group could turn one dollar into ten. A federal grand jury says the dollars went into a roof over his own head, and then into twelve careful slices when the roof was sold.
Miles Burton Marshall pleaded guilty this week to running a $50 million Ponzi scheme out of his Hamilton, New York tax practice for more than three decades. The 988 people who trusted him were mostly his own clients, and the fund that bore his promise had a name that was also its alibi.
Maria Roza Tomescu was sentenced this week to 28 months for cloning the EBT cards of food-stamp recipients across five states. The machine she fed turned hunger benefits into bulk baby formula and energy drinks, then into cash.
On April 17, 2026, Rubén Rocha Moya sat in Mexico City at a presentation on justice administration, twelve days before a federal grand jury in New York unsealed charges alleging he had been on the Sinaloa Cartel's payroll. The indictment does not describe a rogue official who slipped. It describes a system, built piece by piece, where the protection of drug operations was purchased the same way a government purchases any service: with regular payments, delivered on schedule.
On the morning of April 27, 2026, with closing arguments approaching in a 24-felony fraud trial, Gary Rathbun was found dead in his vehicle in Wauseon, Ohio. The $72 million Ponzi scheme he allegedly helped run for a decade did not die with him.
From May 2023 through October 2024, Luther Davis and CJ Evins allegedly impersonated NFL players in video conferences and notarized meetings to extract nearly $20 million in fraudulent loans from specialized sports lenders. On Monday, April 27, 2026, both men pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
For more than a decade, Jay Lucas raised $50 million from over 200 investors by presenting himself as a builder of early-stage wellness companies. The SEC now alleges the building was a stage set, and the investors were the ones holding it up.
Tyler Bossetti raised more than $23 million through Facebook and YouTube by promising investors guaranteed returns of thirty percent or more on real estate deals that mostly did not exist. He spent four years building the machine. He will spend six years in federal prison accounting for it.
The Department of Justice just opened the compensation window for OneCoin victims, but the math is brutal before you even file a claim. Here is what actually happened to your money, where it went, and what forty million dollars means when four billion is already gone.