In the spring of 2020, a Montreal company wired $8.2 million to a purported escrow account for face masks Quebec and Alberta were desperate to receive. Six years later, an Orchard Park business owner has admitted the escrow account was the door the money walked through, not the lock that held it.
An Edmonton police investigation alleges Curtis Quigley and Kathleen Treadgold sold promissory notes tied to real estate flips for twelve years. The houses were the story. The seniors who lost their money were the inventory.
In the summer of 2020, a Minnesota electronics plant invented work that was never done to make a quarter look like growth. Five years later, the SEC named the men who let the number go out.
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.
Terry Chen got six years for a $3.5 million pandemic unemployment fraud. The piece nobody talks about is the contractor who sat at a state laptop and turned the locks off from the inside.
A disbarred South Carolina attorney funneled client settlement money through a bank account that mimicked the name of a legitimate firm. The properties came down this month. The machine is older than the headlines.
Federal prosecutors are moving to seize seven homes and eleven vehicles allegedly bought with money from more than 1,000 investors who believed Christopher Delgado was running a crypto liquidity pool. Court filings say almost none of the $328 million ever reached a pool.
Edwin Emmett Lickiss, Jr., 78, of Danville, pleaded guilty this week to running a Ponzi scheme that lasted from 1998 to 2024 and took at least $9.5 million from more than 93 investors. The license he needed to do any of it was gone by 2016.
Adepoju Salako never set foot in Alaska. He tried to collect seven Permanent Fund Dividends anyway, using stolen names and a VPN that failed him once. On Tuesday a federal judge added eighteen months to the six and a half years he is already serving.
Chanise Coyne of New Boston, Michigan pleaded guilty on May 19 to wiring a family out of $4.6 million in fake modeling fees. Federal prosecutors say the money funded her gambling, not her client's daughter.
A transnational call-center operation allegedly turned the oldest human instinct, the urge to protect a grandchild, into a script. The runners drove Ubers. The closers wore suits no one ever saw.
John Walters was the chief compliance officer at Northwest Capital. On May 18, 2026, he became the first person sentenced in a $72 million Ponzi case that ran for ten years. The lock was inside the door.
Absalom Hall walked into a federal relief program designed for businesses that did not exist and walked out with $85,401. On May 15, a judge sent him to prison for three years. The door he used is still open for thousands of others.
A Boston jury found Takeda liable for paying a generic rival to stay off the market, delaying a cheaper version of Amitiza by roughly six years. The single-damages number is $885 million. Antitrust law triples it.
For eight years, IM Mastery Academy sold young people a trading education backed by Bentleys and Bulgari watches. The FTC says the trainers had no trading records, the claims were baseless, and the lifestyle was the product. The receipts are now in receivership.
Jordan Khammar pleaded guilty in federal court in Brooklyn this week to a decade of wire fraud and money laundering. The machine that moved the money was the same machine he was hired to protect.
A Calgary realtor sold bridge loans for real estate deals that never existed. Four years later, Alberta's regulator cut the largest assurance fund cheque in its forty-year history. It covered less than half the loss.
The last defendant in California's largest Ponzi scheme was sentenced this spring. The fraud ran on solar generators most of which were never built, sold to investors who wanted the tax credit and believed the paperwork.
Roody Metelus ran a tax shop in Dania Beach. The government says he turned wage earners into fake sole proprietors and skimmed a percentage off every PPP loan that cleared. He pleaded guilty last week.
For four months in 2022, a Telegram-promoted app called Global Media paid Indians small amounts to watch advertisements. Then it disappeared with roughly ₹45.33 crore (about $5.4M USD), and the people running it had Cambodian and Malaysian phone numbers.