A West Bloomfield businessman spent seven years telling investors he was about to break ground on a $3 billion youth sports village near Detroit Metro Airport. Federal prosecutors say the land was never his, the escrow account never existed, and the money went somewhere else entirely.
Four Detroit defendants, including two former mail processing clerks, were sentenced in a scheme that moved more than 10,000 stolen checks with a combined face value above $63 million. The marketplace was a Telegram channel. The fuel was the trust people still place in a blue mailbox.
For nearly a decade, Brandon Robinson fed names into the federal student aid pipeline and the pipeline paid him back. The classrooms were real. The students were not.