William Thomas Engle, a 68-year-old former attorney in Southlake, Texas, told small business owners their upfront money would sit in secure accounts until their loans funded. It sat in his personal accounts instead, and then it sat on a yacht.
Tuan Anh Khuu spent five years diverting client settlement funds into his own accounts. The federal sentence came in July 2026. The Oklahoma City couple whose son died in a car accident is one of about twenty-two families who learned the money had a different destination than the one on the retainer agreement.
A Nigerian money launderer named Afeez Adewale was sentenced last week to five years for his role in the sextortion of a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man who died by suicide. The money he moved was $3,000. The cost was a life.
Alicia England filed fake deeds using stolen identities from the living and the dead, then sold houses she never owned to buyers who found the listings on Facebook Marketplace. On July 14, 2026, a federal judge sent her to prison for 75 months.
Jennifer Fleener spent nine years learning how her employer paid claims. Then she spent five more years turning that knowledge into $1.2 million, a network of fake policyholders in the Philippines, and eight federal sentences handed down this summer in the Southern District of Indiana.
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.