Pump & Dump
Eight years after the 1MDB scandal swallowed a Malaysian sovereign fund, Goldman Sachs has agreed to pay $500 million to settle a shareholder class action led by a Swedish pension fund. The fees on the bond deals were ten times what banks normally earned. Everyone in the room agreed not to say so.
By Mark Tell · May 22
Pump & Dump
Ashley Benny, a school board treasurer in a Missouri town of a few hundred people, pitched her board on a "no risk" overseas investment. She did not mention she owned the bank account on the other end of the wire.
By Mark Tell · May 21
Pump & Dump
Matthew Piercey raised $35 million from neighbors and churchgoers in Redding, then tried to disappear into Lake Shasta with a battery-powered underwater scooter when the FBI came for him. On May 21, 2026, a federal judge gave him 30 years.
By Mark Tell · May 21
Pump & Dump
Federal prosecutors say two Minneapolis-area autism therapy centers turned a Medicaid program for autistic children into a billing engine, with one owner allegedly invoicing nine hours a day for 185 straight days. The grand jury indictments unsealed this week add two more names to a case that has already produced two guilty pleas.
By Mark Tell · May 21
Pump & Dump
A Shakopee grandmother heard her grandson's voice on the phone, crying about a car wreck and a jail cell. The voice wasn't her grandson. The $10,000 she shipped to New Jersey was the bait that finally caught the courier.
By Mark Tell · May 20
Pump & Dump
Federal prosecutors in Ohio just closed the door on a romance fraud crew that ran for years on the loneliness of American retirees. The sentences add up to fifty years. The restitution adds up to more than $8 million. The machine that produced both is still running under other names.
By Mark Tell · May 19
Pump & Dump
A jury in Guam convicted Michael Lizaso Marasigan of running a charity bingo as a private bank. Before sentencing, he boarded a plane to the Philippines and never came back.
By Mark Tell · May 19
Pump & Dump
Federal prosecutors say Kristin Draper used Reflections Group Home, a 15-bed facility for at-risk youth in Dayton, Ohio, to wash her boyfriend's fentanyl profits. The Lamborghini SUV he was arrested in, with nearly ten pounds of fentanyl inside, was registered to the group home.
By Mark Tell · May 19
Pump & Dump
A dual citizen was stopped at JFK in September 2024 with a one-way ticket toward Azerbaijan. The bag he was carrying mattered less than the bank accounts he left behind, and the ninety-year-old whose Medicare number was written on a claim form she never saw.
By Mark Tell · May 19
Pump & Dump
Mehrdad Tabrizi pleaded guilty Monday to draining more than a million dollars from federal pandemic relief programs using a non-emergency ambulance company he had already shuttered. The Porsche was the tell.
By Mark Tell · May 18
Pump & Dump
A pseudonymous investigator points at a chart that climbed 537 percent on no news and asks who was holding the float. The answer, on-chain, is almost everyone in the room.
By Mark Tell · May 16
Pump & Dump
Fifteen Ghanaian nationals have been arrested, indicted, or jailed since 2024 in a sprawling romance fraud crackdown. The newest names walked off a plane in May and never made it to the curb.
By Mark Tell · May 16
Pump & Dump
India's market regulator keeps pulling the same machine out of the same river, under different company names. This week it was another one. The buyers at the top of the chart were never supposed to make it out.
By Mark Tell · May 16
Pump & Dump
Jarrell Curne told a bank his entertainment company had a hundred employees and a $1.5 million payroll. It had neither. The wire cleared in forty-eight hours, and the federal government just sentenced him for what came after.
By Mark Tell · May 15
Pump & Dump
Daniella Vasquez worked the books at a Shavano Park homebuilder and a second San Antonio employer. Between May 2021 and September 2022 she moved $759,235.74 to herself and her husband, hiding the wires behind labels that looked like tax payments. On May 13, 2026, a federal judge gave her 51 months and called her lucky.
By Mark Tell · May 14
Pump & Dump
A bookkeeper at a Metairie construction company is accused of bleeding the books for about $44,000. The machine stopped at a teller window, on a check she never should have tried to cash.
By Mark Tell · May 13
Pump & Dump
A federal lawsuit alleges social media operators ran coordinated pump-and-dumps through tiny Nasdaq IPOs, several lead-underwritten by Fort Washington's Bancroft Capital. The filing asks the question every retail investor should: hapless victim, or greedy enabler.
By Mark Tell · May 13
Pump & Dump
A Miramar woman who promised to mint sixty millionaires by 2026 just settled with the FTC. No money changed hands. The people who joined her downline are still where she left them.
By Mark Tell · May 13
Pump & Dump
Federal prosecutors say Owe Martin Andresen sat on millions in administrator commissions from the shuttered Dream Market, then converted them to gold bars shipped to his door. The wallet he thought had gone quiet had been watched the whole time.
By Mark Tell · May 13
Pump & Dump
Bradley Heppner was convicted on all counts in Manhattan last week. The retirees who bought GWG's L Bonds learned what the yield was really paying for.
By Mark Tell · May 13