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.
Jeffrey Royer, a former FBI special agent already convicted once for corruption, pleaded guilty in Detroit to a forex investment fraud that ran from 2020 through 2023. The monthly statements his investors received showed steady gains. The account was bleeding.
Cheungkin Lam was the polite young man behind the counter at a Fresh Meadows TD Bank. Federal prosecutors say he was also the door the thieves walked through.
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.
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.
Marves "Vez" Fairley sold himself as a sports betting prophet to followers who thought he was just better at reading the game. On Thursday in Brooklyn federal court, he admitted the locks were bought, not picked.
Christopher Burdett ran a biodiesel company in Fort Pierce that produced more paperwork than fuel. On May 29, 2026, a federal judge handed him 18 months and a $2.8M restitution bill for a scheme that printed credits the market treated as real.
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.
Troy Murray operated under the name Steve Dixon and ran a database of seven million elderly Americans, selling their names by the hundred to lottery scammers in Jamaica. On May 28, a federal judge gave him 121 months.
Christnel Orisca wore a Suffolk County corrections officer uniform from late 2021 through December 2024. The pandemic relief system, on paper, thought he had no job at all. The gap between those two stories is what a federal judge settled this week.
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.
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.
Samuel Ugberaese was extradited from Nigeria and arrested by the FBI this month on charges tied to a romance scam network that operated from 2014 to 2018. The indictment is the record. The widow at the kitchen table is the cost.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.