Fraud | featured news

It’s not the subplot to a Jerry Bruckheimer movie: drug dealers in Mexico really are kidnapping computer whizzes and forcing them to hack into bank systems and program credit card fraud scams in order to acquire additional funds on top of what they haul in from selling drugs.

Spend the night at a hotel and get a call from the front desk and it could turn out to be a con artist trying to steal your credit card number.

Regulators are cracking down on record waste and fraud in the unemployment insurance system, saying the money could go to legitimate claims.

Military officials are charging three California-based Marine corporals with fraud and larceny for entering in a pair of sham marriages to collect housing funding, officials said. The military alleges that a lesbian couple — one a Marine, the other a civilian — decided to live together off base and wanted to collect the $1,200 housing benefit granted to married Marines.

Taylor, Bean and Whitaker Mortgage Corp's former chairman, convicted of masterminding a $2.9 billion fraud scheme before the company collapsed, was sentenced on Thursday to 30 years in prison.

An El Monte man was sentenced to three years in state prison Wednesday in connection with a scheme to recruit 200 Chinese nationals and charge them for joining a phony Army Special Forces unit that he led as "supreme commander," Los Angeles County prosecutors said.

Investors who were misled into purchasing complex mortgage securities just before the housing market collapsed will receive all their money back.

The nation's largest mortgage companies are operating on the assumption that they will have to pay as much as $20 billion to resolve claims of widespread foreclosure abuse, an amount four times what they had originally proposed, the top federal official overseeing the discussions told state officials Monday, according to people who participated in the conversation.

In an aggressive move against online gambling, federal prosecutors allege three Internet poker companies tricked banks into processing billions of dollars of illegal betting proceeds.

Prosecutors said Melchert-Dinkel, of Faribault, Minn., was obsessed with suicide and hanging and sought out potential victims on the Internet. When he found them, prosecutors said, he posed as a female nurse, feigned compassion and offered step-by-step instructions on how they could kill themselves.