Barbara Hirshfield agreed to plead guilty this week to running a $10.9M Ponzi scheme through a West Springfield loan company that had lost its license to lend in 2014. Over 200 people kept sending her checks anyway. They did not know the company they were funding was no longer allowed to make loans.
Elaine Angene Escoe allegedly ran ninety fake relief applications through four federal programs, then disappeared into an alias in Jamaica. The paperwork was waiting when she came back.
Christopher Delgado has agreed to plead guilty to running a $250 million crypto Ponzi out of Orlando. The pool he sold investors on existed mostly as a phrase in a law firm's opinion letter.
Xin Liu was sentenced to 27 months for driving from one Florida porch to another, collecting envelopes of cash from elderly victims who had been told, by voices on the phone, that their grandchildren were in jail. She was the last visible piece of a machine whose other parts were on a different continent.
Patrick Bucknum ran a network that paid the bills for eleven Washington clinics. For six years, the federal complaint says, he ran the clinics' money through his own brokerage account instead.
Jean Wilson, 54, built a career teaching healthcare compliance and then ran a telehealth operation that the Justice Department says billed Medicare for $136 million in braces and pills no one needed. On Tuesday she got ten years.