Stefano Zanetti ran the U.S. side of a Montreal-built grandparent scam, coordinating couriers who collected cash from elderly victims in cities the network rotated through to stay ahead of police. A federal judge in Pittsburgh just gave him more than fifteen years.
For nearly a decade, Brandon Robinson fed names into the federal student aid pipeline and the pipeline paid him back. The classrooms were real. The students were not.
For nearly nine years, an Orlando plastering company sold a paper promise to hundreds of subcontractors: insurance certificates that looked real and a payroll channel that ran in cash. On May 6, 2026, a federal judge put numbers on what it cost.
Warith Deen Muhammad sold a precious metals trade that paid 5 to 10 percent in thirty days. Federal prosecutors say the gold was a story and the investors were the inventory. On Wednesday he was sentenced to four years and two months.
John Robert Leake pitched gold mines in Ghana and villas in Costa Rica. Six investors gave him roughly $8.1 million. Federal prosecutors are now asking a California court to garnish the NFL benefits he earned as a linebacker to pay back what the court says he stole.
A Belleville tax preparer admitted in federal court this week to filing hundreds of false returns, hiding six figures of her own income while inflating her clients' deductions. The clients who trusted her with their most private numbers may now owe the government money they were told they had already handled.
A finance employee nearly sent $100,000 to a fake vendor after a video call with a man who looked and sounded exactly like his boss. The man on the screen was a file. The wire was real.
For eight years, Lester T. Jones Jr. ran the Atlanta Hawks' expense reimbursement program and the corporate American Express account at the same time. The two systems did not talk to each other. Neither did the people he supervised.
Lester T. Jones Jr. spent eight years feeding an NBA franchise's expense system the lies it was built to swallow. On April 29, 2026, a federal judge told him the lies cost forty-one months.
From May 2023 through October 2024, Luther Davis and CJ Evins allegedly impersonated NFL players in video conferences and notarized meetings to extract nearly $20 million in fraudulent loans from specialized sports lenders. On Monday, April 27, 2026, both men pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
Tyler Bossetti raised more than $23 million through Facebook and YouTube by promising investors guaranteed returns of thirty percent or more on real estate deals that mostly did not exist. He spent four years building the machine. He will spend six years in federal prison accounting for it.