Benjamin Alexander, 43, of Sudbury pleaded guilty to fraud over $5,000 after a Coniston senior was drained through two phone calls in three days. The court ordered restitution. The machine behind the calls did not stop.
Michelle Acker pleaded guilty this week to a six-year wire fraud that drained more than $670,000 from an elderly woman and her friend. The mechanism was a voice on the phone, an emergency that never ended, and an insurance agent who never existed.
Abdoul Issaka Assimiou of Parma, Ohio was sentenced to 63 months for laundering money from elderly romance scam victims for co-conspirators in Ghana. The story is not really about him. It is about the woman who wired the money.
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.
David L. Johnson, a 66-year-old Greenwich antiques dealer, pleaded guilty on July 21, 2026 to laundering more than $2.1 million he took from an elderly client who trusted him with her power of attorney, her will, and her trust. He kept stealing after she was in the ground.
Xin Liu was the hand at the door. The voice on the phone was someone else, somewhere else, and the cash she collected over eight days in July had a name on it that belonged to a woman who thought she was saving her grandson.