Pump & Dump

The invoice was real. The bank account belonged to someone else.

Kelvin Owusu Nkwantabisa got 204 months in a Florida federal court for leading a $38 million email hijacking ring. The mechanism he ran is still sitting inside every accounts-payable inbox in America.

Latest
Ponzi / Pyramid

The detective who knew the paperwork was the lock and the key

John Bolden wore a shield by day and ran a tax prep franchise on the side. Federal prosecutors say he used the second job to feed the first one's friends, family, and clients into a pandemic relief program he knew nobody was watching.

Pump & Dump

The relief line had a back door, and the chef knew where it opened

Philip Camino built restaurants in three states and a fraud across more than twenty PPP and EIDL applications. On May 28, a federal judge called it what it was. Just greed.

Pump & Dump

He was too ashamed to say he lost it. So he kept taking more.

For six years, Thomas Pipich Jr. moved money out of a fund a dying Berkeley professor built for his children and called the transfers a loan. There was no loan. There was only shame, and the machine shame built to hide itself.

Ponzi / Pyramid

The statements kept arriving. The money had already left.

Carl Channing Spence ran AEI Financial from his Mont Belvieu home, promising friends and neighbors 10 to 12 percent on meme stock trades. The statements showed growth. The account showed something else.

The Daily Brief

The contractor with the company laptop knew which holds to remove

Elena Ruiz · May 25

Seven Alaskans never knew their names tried to fly north without them

Elena Ruiz · May 21

The relief program had a door. He walked through it eighty-five thousand times.

Elena Ruiz · May 19

The Ferrari was leased. The gold was a story. The investors were the inventory.

Elena Ruiz · May 6

The skimmer at the checkout, the Red Bull at the register, and the mother who could not buy formula

Elena Ruiz · May 1
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