Blog posts with "white collar crime"

As reported in this PBS NewsHour video by anchor Judy Woodruff: Five major institutions pled guilty to rigging currencies and manipulating the foreign exchange market. The banks also agreed to pay more than $5 billion combined in new penalties. The fines were some of the biggest brought to date by the federal government. The banks were accused of manipulating the world’s largest and least regulated trading market, where trillions of dollars change hands. Among those pleading guilty, J.P. M...

According to a Federal News Radio article entitled FBI investigating NASA whistleblower reports of Chinese data breach, Congressman Frank Wolf informed the FBI that NASA whistleblowers “approached him, claiming that higher-ups had authorized the hiring of a contractor employee connected with an organization within China that federal agencies already had red-flagged as a potential national security threat.” Congressman Wolf stated that the subject contract employee was a Chinese national �...

Congratulations to our friends at Kohn, Kohn and Colapinto for securing the largest whistleblower award to an individual in history. On September 11, 2012, the National Whistleblowers Center announced the IRS award of $104,000,000 to Bradley Birkenfeld – the whistleblower who exposed a massive tax evasion scheme involving Swiss bank accounts. At the recorded press conference, Attorney Stephen M. Kohn declared: Today, the IRS sent 104 million messages to whistleblowers around the world...

According to a recent Department of Justice press release, 107 doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals were charged with $452 million dollars of fraudulent Medicare billing in a single takedown by the Medicare Fraud Strike Force. The health care professionals were accused of fraud-based crimes such as conspiracy to commit health care fraud, health care fraud, kickback violations, and money laundering relating to “a variety of alleged fraud schemes involving various medical tr...

  A recent article from Reuters illuminated an interesting dilemma that the IRS is currently facing in reference to what may be the largest example of tax fraud in US history. The alleged fraud involves the improper handling of the transfer of mortgages into and out of a legal entity known as a Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit (REMIC), investments which totaled $3 billion in 2010 alone. The IRS allows for special tax treatment of REMICs, exempting the securities created by the REMIC f...

  In an Orlando Sentinel article by Susan Jacobson entitled Elderly who trusted high- living couple now face nightmares, former clients spoke out about Ross and Linda Littlefield, who were “charged with 10 counts of fraudulently using the Lentzes' credit cards, one count of fraudulently using their personal-identification information and one count of engaging in a scheme to defraud for at least $20,000 but less than $50,000.” Following are excerpts from the article: When her husband's Al...

On June 24, 2011, the law office of Campbell Law P.A. filed a lawsuit for civil damages in the Circuit Court of Osceola County, Florida against disbarred-attorney Linda Vasquez Littlefield based on allegations that she and her former husband, Ross Littlefield, operated a criminal enterprise that defrauded elderly clients out of their life savings. Campbell Law brought this suit on behalf of individuals suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia, as well as their representatives, who claim the ...

Shahin Kashanchi was arrested a couple of days ago on charges of scheming with his brother-in-law Hassan Nemazee to defraud Citibank and HSBC of $290 million. Nemazee was arrested on August 25, 2009 and indicted for using fraudulent documents to secure loans from the victim banks, and executing a ponzi scheme against them by paying partial proceeds of the loans from one bank to the debts owed to the other and likewise.   Many of the fraudulent documents used in Nemazee's scheme were allegedl...

In the headlines is the news that Cisco may be acquiring Skype. Mind you, this is a rumor from one of TechCrunch's "more reliable sources," so it is hard to say how much truth is actually in it. According to the post, this pre-IPO acquisition of Skype would be for somewhere in the ballpark of $5 billion.   Though not a new rumor, Google had supposedly also jockeyed for this position. Skype would be a natural fit for Google's gradual expansion into the voice market, alongside its Gchat, GTalk...

In an interesting New York Times article, the author examines the basic functions of Russian cyber criminal networks and why they often go unpunished. Here are a few quotes:  Law enforcement groups in Russia have been reluctant to pursue these talented authors of Internet fraud, for reasons, security experts say, of incompetence, corruption or national pride. Underscoring the nationalistic tone of much of Russian computer crime, one site [hacker site that exchanged credit card numbers to ai...