Miles Guo built a movement, a media empire, and a coin. Prosecutors say he built them on the savings of Chinese immigrants who thought they were funding a revolution. On June 29, a federal judge sent him away for thirty years. His fans still came.
Jedrek Upton walked into federal court in Sacramento with a Ferrari lease, a Lamborghini lease, and a $2.7 million property behind him. All of it, prosecutors said, was paid for with pandemic relief money meant for workers who did not exist.
A self-exiled Chinese billionaire built an anti-CCP movement online, took more than a billion dollars from the people who believed in it, and spent it on a yacht, a Ferrari, and a pair of $36,000 mattresses. On June 29, 2026, a Manhattan judge handed him thirty years.
Phillip Collins of Robeson County, North Carolina pleaded guilty on June 29 to wire fraud conspiracy in a COVID-era SBA loan scheme. The pattern is small, ordinary, and still running through other names.
For seven years, Fred Sharp allegedly ran the back office of a billion-dollar penny stock machine from a quiet B.C. address. This week, Canada's highest court closed the last door he had left.
For nineteen years, Andrew Hamilton Jacobus mailed Venezuelan doctors, lawyers, and parishioners account statements showing money that was not there. In March 2026 a federal judge gave him twenty years. The statements were the machine.
Two illegal aliens were sentenced to 78 months for forcing ATMs to vomit cash in a scheme federal prosecutors call the financial engine of a Venezuelan prison gang. The machine kept running long after the arrests.
Aaron Zahn engineered a bonus plan that could have paid him $40 million if Jacksonville sold its public utility. The sale died. The bonuses never paid. His lawyers told a federal appeals court this week that means nothing was stolen. The judges did not seem persuaded.
Peter Murrell ran the Scottish National Party's books for two decades. For twelve of those years, court records show, he was quietly running another set of books inside the first one.
Between 2016 and 2018, nearly half a million people bought Match.com subscriptions within 24 hours of getting a message from an account the company already suspected was fake. The $14 million settlement closes a case the FTC originally valued at $884 million.
Vietnamese police indicted nearly 200 people across eleven companies running a vacation-club scheme that allegedly took over VND 612 billion from middle-aged and elderly buyers. The pitch was a free gift. The trap was a contract nobody was meant to read.
A Solana treasury company let its CEO and a board member buy themselves 2.298 million new shares at a premium nobody else was offered. The largest shareholder says that was not a vote of confidence. It was a valve.
A ₹1.25 crore hole at an SBI branch in Dhanbad opened in 2002. The men accused of digging it lived under other names for two decades. Last weekend, the names caught up.
A federal court ordered a penny stock promoter tied to the Barry Honig ring to pay $1.7 million for his role in a long-running pump-and-dump. The number is real. So is the retiree in Ohio who held the shares when the music stopped.
When the ambulance pulled away from a Great Falls house on the last day of August 2023, the door was unlocked and the checkbook was on the couch. The neighbors next door took the easy door, and a federal judge took four years from one of them.
William Smith spent eleven years draining a Detroit non-profit while signing off on the books himself. On Wednesday, a federal appeals court told him the 19-year sentence stands.
KP George ran Fort Bend County while a jury was deciding whether he had washed his own campaign money through his own checking account. On June 16, they decided.
Laura Frantz of Saluda, South Carolina, was sentenced to federal prison this week for moving money stolen through business email compromise. The FBI says they warned her more than once. She kept the account open anyway.
Currin Caridine ran a kickback assembly line through the PPP program, recruiting Mainers and New Hampshire residents into fake applications for businesses that did not exist. The Small Business Administration paid out roughly $475,000 before the machine got names.
A Hong Kong dentist spent two years wiring her savings to a man she believed was an American businessman in Istanbul. Turkish police now say the man was Nigerian, the romance was a script, and the bank accounts were a relay system.