Ponzi / Pyramid

The spreadsheet had names, socials, and a column for what each identity earned

Christopher Staggs ran his pandemic unemployment scheme out of a Chicago LLC and kept a ledger of the people whose identities fueled it. On June 9, 2026, a federal judge gave him two years.

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

WS Capital was registered with the SEC. That sentence was the whole machine.

Thomas Aaron Signorelli sold a sentence, not a strategy. The sentence was true on its face and a lie in its meaning, and it carried more than $1.9 million in losses before a federal judge in San Francisco closed the file.

Pump & Dump

The applications were the business. The business was the applications.

Nikenson Jean Mathurin sat at a keyboard in Sparta, New Jersey, and built fifteen businesses that did not exist. A federal jury in Newark needed four days to see what he had actually built.

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.

The Daily Brief

The badge clocked in at the jail. The benefits app said he was unemployed.

Mark Tell · May 29

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

Elena Ruiz · May 19

The Porsche cost sixty thousand dollars. The ambulance company had been closed for two years.

Mark Tell · May 18

The application said one hundred employees. The company had none.

Mark Tell · May 15

The tax preparer's office was the door. The PPP loan was the room behind it.

Elena Ruiz · May 13
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