Fraud

Customers of the Claude artificial-intelligence chatbot are being targeted by a fraud scheme in which scammers use compromised accounts to buy hundreds of pounds’ worth of gift cards.

Canada is moving to create a powerful new law enforcement agency dedicated to investigating and prosecuting financial crime, a step that places Ottawa on a sharply different course from Washington, where the Trump administration has scaled back federal fraud enforcement.

World Liberty Financial, the Trump family-linked crypto venture, announced a deal in November to enable its USD1 stablecoin on a crypto network whose flagship resort project was controlled by two men the U.S. government had sanctioned weeks earlier as alleged operatives of an Asian scam ring.

Greece’s ruling New Democracy party has launched an aggressive campaign against European Chief Prosecutor Laura Codruța Kövesi over her office’s investigation into a corruption scandal involving hundreds of millions of euros in European Union farm subsidies.

The European Union’s anti-fraud office has opened a formal investigation into Lord Peter Mandelson, the bloc’s former trade commissioner and recently dismissed British ambassador to Washington, over alleged misconduct during his four years in Brussels. 

U.S. officials on Wednesday struck at Southeast Asian scam compounds defrauding Americans and a global fentanyl supply chain, announcing criminal charges, sanctions, and the seizure of hundreds of fraudulent websites in a pair of coordinated enforcement actions.

The founder of a Newnan, Georgia-based lender that marketed faith-based investments to conservative audiences was charged with felony wire fraud on Thursday, escalating a civil fraud case into a criminal prosecution nearly a year after regulators shuttered what they described as a $140 million Ponzi scheme.

A Moldovan court on Wednesday sentenced oligarch and former political leader Vladimir Plahotniuc to 19 years in prison for his role in a massive bank fraud scheme that siphoned funds from three lenders in 2014.

The U.S. Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on charges that the civil-rights organization fraudulently paid informants inside extremist groups and concealed those payments with bank accounts opened for nonexistent companies. 

Cybercrime syndicates operating in Cambodia have grown so large and politically connected that the industry now rivals the country’s formal economy, with online scam networks accused of corrupting officials, enslaving workers, and defrauding victims around the world.