The most valuable data in the world

 It is only ok when we do it!

~

Facebook Decision Enables IRS To Seek Commensurate With Income Enforcement Against Meta

Public Money, Private Benefit Working Class Storytelling

 Russiagate Releases Lifting a Veil on Surveillance State Abuses Matt Taibbi

Cyber attack exposes details of thousands of internet provider iiNet's customers

First robodebt, now robodole. Both failed Australia’s most vulnerable

Unlawful automation, vulnerable people hurt, and the APS again accused of moving too slowly. It’s déjà vu all over again.

Ride-sharing apps are bad, actually Edward Ongweso Jr. “Or why Matthew Yglesias has no clue what he’s talking about.”

 

Fragile Movements Crumble Hamilton Nolan

 

NY Times: SpaceX Gets Billions From The Government, Pays Little In Taxes

Labor’s Strategy Must Lean Into SynergiesConvergence Mag

Veteran fact-checker says Trump made it ‘acceptable for politicians to lie with impunity’

Poynter: “The Washington Post Fact Checker is leaving the field. After close to 15 years of fact-checking, Glenn Kessler took a buyout as part of the Post’s recent newsroom overhaul. Kessler’s work helped rejuvenate fact-checking journalism in the United States, along with organizations like PolitiFact (owned by Poynter) and FactCheck.org. 

The most valuable data in the world

Claire Berlinski – If data is the new oil, Elon Musk is the new Persian Gulf – “The list below is part of the second installment of The MechaHitler Reich. In a better world, it would be a sidebar to that newsletter—something you could glance at while you were reading it. But alas, this is not the best of all possible worlds, and Substack doesn’t give me that option. 

I got worried that if I put the list at the top of the article, no one would read the article. But I also worried that if I put it at the end of the article, no one would read the list. I spent too much time compiling this list for that prospect to be tolerable. So I’ve decided just to send it separately. 

Hang on to it, and when you receive Part II, keep it in an open tab just slightly to the left of your open newsletter, okay? As if it were a sidebar to an article. This is the most complete account I can come up with of the agencies in which Grok has been deployed, and the databases it has probably mined. It isn’t final, and it isn’t exhaustive. It’s only what I was able to put together from reports in the news and court filings. 

Unless I’ve seen a credible report indicating that DOGE has access to a database, I haven’t listed it, even if it would be reasonable to surmise that it has. I use the word “probably” because in many cases, the reporting isn’t clear. An article might say, for example, that DOGE was given access to a database, but it might not say explicitly that the data wound up in Grok.

 Or it says that the data was “analyzed using AI,” but doesn’t say that this AI was Grok. I’m assuming that probably, every time DOGE gains access to a database, its contents are swiftly fed to Grok, as a matter of routine. We have a consistent portrait of DOGE’s modus operandi. In report after report, court filing after court filing, employees recount witnessing the following sequence of events:

1. The DOGE boys arrived.
2. They figured out where the data was.
3. They demanded the highest level of access to it.
4. They weren’t interested in hearing that this was illegal and a violation of every known security protocol.
5. They made it clear that they viewed the people who offered these objections as caviling Deep-State dinosaurs who should be replaced with AI as quickly as possible.
6. If anyone tried to stop them, they were fired.
7. Either these positions were left vacant or they were filled by someone pliant and DOGE-friendly.
8. DOGE hooked up the department’s most sensitive databases to God-knows-what kind of server and vacuumed up the data without regard to long-established data-protection protocols.
9. The chief security officer began vomiting or had an aneurysm.
10. He quit or sued.
11. DOGE used Grok, or “some kind of AI,” to analyze the data.
12. If the courts temporarily blocked their access to the data, DOGE looked for ways to skirt the court order.
13. DOGE’s attorneys told judges who had blocked their access that they would be very, very responsible with the data, or they promised to send only DOGE boys who’d received training in data handling.
14. In some cases, the judge (or the White House and the Treasury Department) said they could have the data, but only in read-only mode, or an anonymized version. Otherwise, the judges mostly decided that DOGE should have unimpeded access to the data.
15. If they hadn’t done so already, DOGE swiftly vacuumed up the data without any regard to long-established data protection protocols, then used Grok, or “some kind of AI,” to analyze it.
16. The data soon showed up on the open Internet (sometimes on Elon Musk’s X feed). Foreign adversaries (Russia especially), profiting from the security vulnerabilities created by DOGE’s behavior, launched attack after attack on these now-vulnerable databases. Security analysts were left shaking, gibbering wrecks.

So whenever we read of DOGE gaining access to a database, it’s reasonable to think the data has already been shoveled into Grok’s maw. But I’m not 100 percent sure, hence “probably.”

 I assume, when I read that DOGE used AI to analyze the data, that the AI in question is Grok. I can’t imagine Musk’s employees would feed all this precious data to a rival AI, can you? But again, I’m not 100 percent sure. Unless I’ve found reporting to the contrary, I’ve assumed that DOGE still has access to these databases. 

Despite the Trump-Musk feud, Musk-aligned cadre remain inside the executive branch, so I don’t know why they wouldn’t. This list is probably very incomplete, because it doesn’t necessarily make the news when DOGE helps itself to another data set. 

But it will give you a sense of the scale of this undertaking. Normally, sharing data from a federal agency requires the agency’s authorization and the oversight of a specialist who ensures adherence to relevant privacy and confidentiality laws and regulations. 

DOGE hasn’t bothered with any of that. What they’re doing is a thousand kinds of illegal. But the law doesn’t enforce itself, and if the executive doesn’t feel like enforcing the law, then for practical purposes, no law exists…”

 

Appeals Court Allows DOGE Access to Sensitive Data at Several Agencies

The New York Times no paywall: “A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed teamsaffiliated with the Department of Government Efficiency to gain access to potentially sensitive data on millions of Americans, overruling a lower court that had blocked that access in February. 

By a 2-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit granted the access to data stored at the Treasury Department, the Education Department and the Office of Personnel Management, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in a similar case in June involving Social Security data. 

The decision cleared the way for teams put in place this year by Elon Musk to reclaim “high-level I.T. access” to government databases, Judge Julius N. Richardson wrote, over the objections of a number of labor unions who had sued, arguing the move violated federal privacy laws. Writing for the majority, Judge Richardson said the circumstances of the case mirrored those in a lawsuit involving data that the Supreme Court had weighed as an emergency application this year.

 In an unsigned order in that case, the Supreme Court intervened to allow the DOGE analysts to continue sifting through the records “in order for those members to do their work.” Besides sensitive financial data linked to Social Security benefits, the government regularly collects other information on residents such as addresses, employer details and related statistics that could be used to identify individual people. The decision on Tuesday also concerned that kind of data, as well as information on student debt stored at the Education Department, which collects personal financial data on more than 40 million borrowers. 

Judge Richardson, a Trump appointee, and Judge G. Steven Agee, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, formed the majority. Over the course of multiple lawsuits, the Justice Department has argued that the DOGE teams were directed by President Trump to scrutinize federal data to screen for evidence of wasted taxpayers dollars, redundant contracts or fraud. 

After several federal judges moved this year to restrict their access, the government offered a number of concessions, including agreeing to have DOGE staff undergo routine security trainings and background checks, or to limit their access to only anonymized data that could not be linked to individual people. But as those cases have been appealed, the Supreme Court and appellate judges have more consistently sided with the government in allowing members of DOGE largely unfettered access to government systems…”

 “Superstition is another mighty evil, and has caused much terrible cruelty. The man who is a slave to it despises others who are wiser, tries to force them to do as he does.”

 Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Thousands of formerly secret files on police misconduct in CA made public through searchable database

The Independent: “Thousands of previously secret files on alleged police misconduct in California have now been made public through a searchable database. 

The Police Records Access Project database, painstakingly assembled over seven years by journalists, activists, and data scientists, went public on Monday with documents from more than 400 government agencies across the Golden State. The records open a window into nearly 12,000 cases involving alleged police misconduct or the use of serious force, ranging from dishonesty through brutality complaints to repeated sexual harassment by officers. 

The database will allow researchers, journalists, members of the public, and victims of police misconduct to dig into how California cops have handled such cases, while helping defense lawyers identify officers who may have skeletons in their closets. “In 2018, California had some of the most secret records in the country. So people decided to work together,” project co-founder Lisa Pickoff-White told The San Francisco Chronicle, one of the news outlets providing access to the database. 

The records can be searched publicly online via the Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco broadcaster KQED, or the state wide news nonprofit CalMatters. The project has its roots in 2018, when California’s state legislature reversed decades of secrecy and mass-unsealed all police records involving the use of serious force or findings of officer dishonesty or sexual assault. 

Another law in 2021 also unsealed all records involving findings of police discrimination, excessive force, wrongful arrests, or wrongful searchers. Journalists spent years methodically requesting documents from police departments, sheriff’s departments, transit agencies, prisons, coroners’ officers, prosecutors, and oversight bodies, eventually pooling their efforts in a collective of more than 30 news outlets. 

Researchers at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and Stanford University’s Big Local News project then created the searchable database, with help from the ACLU and numerous other academic and civil society organizations — as well as funding from the state of California, the Sony Foundation, and Jay-Z’s entertainment company Roc Nation…”

What is the richest country in the world in 2025?

 Hundreds of Former Israeli Spies Are Working in Big Tech, Database Shows Drop Site

Dictators love a crisis. “For reasons of both personality and political ambition, Trump needs a crisis to govern — or rather, to rule. And if the actual conditions of reality will not give him a state of exception, he’ll create one himself.”

Battle over secrecy of major ATO tech investigation

The ASU claims it was misled in pursuit of the Bristow report, adding new heat to the ATO’s long-running technology governance headaches.

America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State

The Atlantic – no paywall – “This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “A Warning Out of Time.” It has been updated to clarify that Ernst Fraenkel deployed with the German army in World War I to Poland and the Western Front.

As Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. 

What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply

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Why the household analogy in economics is wrong

As I have written many times before, one of the most persistent and damaging myths in economics is the so-called household analogy. This is the
Read the full article…

What is the richest country in the world in 2025?

The Economist – no paywall: “Being Rich is not just about earning more. Prices differ between countries, and a modest salary can go further where things are cheaper. Working hours vary too: some places manage to generate high incomes with fewer hours of labour, leaving time for leisure. So which countries are truly rich? 

To answer that we ranked 178 countries using three measures. The first is GDP per person at market exchange rates. It is simple and intuitive, and widely cited. But it ignores price differences between countries. The second measure adjusts incomes for these local costs (known as purchasing-power parity, or PPP). This offers a better guide to living standards but one that takes no account of leisure time: the share of people in work, and how long they work, varies by country. 

Our final yardstick accounts for both local prices and hours worked. See how the countries stack up below. The three countries that top our lists are Switzerland, Singapore and Norway. In dollar terms Switzerland comes top, with average earnings above $100,000 last year. Singapore and Norway follow, at $90,700 and $86,800, respectively. 

But Switzerland is also one of the most expensive countries in the world, so its high salaries do not stretch very far. Adjusted for local costs, Singapore jumps ahead. And adjusted for hours worked, Norway takes first place, as it did last year, followed by Qatar and Denmark. America, the world’s biggest economy by GDP, ranks 4th, 7th and 6th on the three measures. Britain is placed 19th, 27th and 25th. How countries’ ranking changes across measures can reflect social patterns. 

Those where few women are paid to work—such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey—rank higher on income per hour than on income alone, because earnings are concentrated among fewer people. Countries with unusually old or young populations also shift: in Italy, many people are retired; in Nigeria, many are not yet of working age. In both, a smaller working cohort supports a larger one..”

Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s AI Feud Gets NastyTime

 

Elon Musk says Tesla will be worth $30 trillion one day — but investors think otherwise The Cool Down

 

Elon Musk’s ‘Right-Hand Man’ Dumps 82% Of Tesla Stake Since 2023 — Gordon Johnson Flags ‘Alarming’ Insider Sell-Off Benzinga

Kenya FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2025

Why young Kenyans are so angry Africa’s ‘demographic dividend’ won’t pay off if ageing leaders continue to stifle their aspirations

Anyone going about to set ablaze someone’s business or property should be shot in the leg, taken to hospital and taken to court. They should not kill them, but break their leg.” These are not the musings of a vigilante property owner urging summary justice, or of a Haitian gang leader seeking to impose Queensberry rules on gangland warfare. No, these are the words of Kenya’s president, William Ruto — issued last month as an order to police dealing with the most persistent wave of youth protests the east African country has seen in decades.  

Ruto, charming and articulate when addressing a foreign audience, turns out to be a thug when he talks to his own people. Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan writer and political analyst, argues that his choice of Swahili over English for this edict was calculated to avoid international opprobrium and to separate the president’s slick image overseas from his ruthless instincts in the cut-throat world of Kenyan politics. 

Kenya is in many ways one of Africa’s most successful economies. But its political class has failed to build on that to create the investment climate or growth momentum needed to meet the aspirations of its increasingly well educated and sophisticated youth. The result has been more than a year of rolling demonstrations. They have been led by members of Gen Z, those born after the late 1990s, though they have appealed to broader sections of society. . .

Letter: Young Kenyans could get really mad, deservedly so From Peter Doyle, Washington, DC, US

David Pilling’s ode to Kenya’s Gen Z (“Why young Kenyans are so angry”, Opinion, August 11) describes Kenya’s economy as “in many ways, one of Africa’s most successful”. 

But that leaves the principal culprit for their anger completely out of the script: long-standing macroeconomic disorder, fruit both of the persistence with colonial land distribution policies and fiscal policy under IMF supervision which has veered between too tight (mostly) and too loose. 

After decades in which growth in Kenya’s GDP per capita consequently lagged far behind that of best peers at its level of income, tax demands in mid-2024 at the behest of the IMF constituted the straw which broke the Gen-Z camel’s back — hence the outburst of protests. 

While, like Pilling, we at the Kenyan Institute of Economic Affairs lament the authorities’ subsequent return to authoritarianism, we welcome on macroeconomic grounds both their belated rejection of the badly ill- designed IMF demands and their premature termination of the IMF programme earlier this year. 

But that has left Kenya with an unsustainable debt, a rightly enraged youth and a highly fragile political balance. So we have called for the immediate resolution of the debt situation via a “collaborative default” — with Kenya working closely with the IMF to write off debt worth some 15 per cent of GDP, promptly coupled with a highly targeted land reform. Both these steps are essential for long-run growth. 

However the authorities simply turn a blind eye to the debt algebra, and the IMF too goes on ignoring the core Kenyan political economy. If both these conditions persist, look to the young to get really mad — and rightly so. 

Peter Doyle Washington, DC, US

FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2025 — the longlist Tales of geopolitics and growth — plus a rare novel — are among this year’s contenders 

A novel has made it on to the longlist for business book of the year for the first time in 15 years, joining a wide range of non-fiction titles on topical themes from geoeconomics to growth to geniuses. Alexander Starritt’s Drayton and Mackenzie, which follows the paths of two start-up entrepreneurs, is the first work of fiction to grace the list since Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic in 2010, and only the third in the 21-year history of the prize. 

The £30,000 Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award, also backed by FT owner Nikkei, aims to identify the title with the “most compelling and enjoyable” insights into modern business issues. Last year’s winner was Parmy Olson’s Supremacy, about the rivalry between pioneers of artificial intelligence. Including Starritt’s book, 16 titles were filtered by FT journalists from more than 500 entries, to make up this year’s longlist. 

Geopolitics and economics Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by academic Dan Wang, due out later this month, looks at the China-US relationship that is the central geoeconomic challenge for Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. Wang describes China as an “engineering state”, pitting its innovation and ambition against the blocking instincts of the US “lawyerly” state. 

In Chokepoints: How the Global Economy Became a Weapon of War, Edward Fishman analyses the use of sanctions, notably against Russia over the past decade. 

A former US state department official, Fishman also describes the dedication and ingenuity of the people who devised and operate an economic arsenal that has evolved at pace during the 21st century, with profound consequences.  

How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations, by Carl Benedikt Frey — to be published next month — is a sweeping 1,000-year analysis of the fate of civilisations and institutions. Frey asks what happens when the balance between innovation and bureaucracy fails and what important lessons today’s dominant economic powers, including the US, China and Europe, should take from such failures. 

Mike Bird’s The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset, due out in November, analyses the disproportionate weight land has on economic and political decision-making. 

Bird explains the role of land in determining, through human history, how power is distributed, from the US to China, and the effect on investment, wealth and inequality. In Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, Joan C Williams looks at the US left’s failure to challenge the rise of Trump, through the lens of workers and the working class. 

She aims to explain how that happened and how the Democratic elite might use economic and political tools to recover support. Geniuses Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away, published next month, is David Gelles’s look at the life and career of the founder of the ubiquitous outerwear manufacturer. 

He explores Chouinard’s unconventional leadership, culminating in his idiosyncratic 2022 decision to forfeit ownership of Patagonia and direct profits to fighting climate change, and what it says about the nature of capitalism.  Alexander Starritt’s Drayton and Mackenzie is, among other things, an examination of the nature of business genius. 

Starritt’s novel traces the entrepreneurial partnership and friendship of two Oxford graduates and McKinsey alumni as they build an ambitious green energy company, and features real-life economic and business figures, including Tesla and SpaceX impresario Elon Musk and central bankers Ben Bernanke and Mario Draghi. Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, sits at the heart of Karen Hao’s Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination. 

Her deep examination of the rise of the company that created ChatGPT analyses the roots and results of Altman’s fierce competitive edge and the sometimes dysfunctional leadership style he practises. Helen Lewis’s The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers cuts through the idolisation of tech chieftains and sets our never-ending obsession with individuals in the wider cultural context that allows so-called geniuses to flourish, not to mention the role of luck and timing in their ascent.   

In House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company, journalist Eva Dou delves deep into the mysterious past of Ren Zhengfei, founder of the Chinese technology group, drawing out both the commercial and geopolitical implications of Huawei’s rise, and Ren’s, and the Chinese state’s, role in shaping the company. Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the world’s most coveted microchip traces the ascent of Nvidia, the chipmaker behind the artificial intelligence revolution. 

Witt analyses how Huang’s dictatorial leadership style, combined with dry humour, has helped shape the world’s most valuable company.  Growth Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance: How We Build a Better Future addresses head-on the growth dilemma facing the US, trapped between a left wing that will not make necessary trade-offs between regulation and investment and a right wing bent on gutting the government’s ability to support innovation. 

The consequences of growth are forensically analysed by Saabira Chaudhuri in Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic. She lays out how branding, freshness, ease of use and pursuit of profit combined to override environmental and pollution concerns and makes the case for pushing the costs of plastic’s overuse back on producers. 

Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About it takes the writer and activist’s term for the decay of online platforms and explains the implications for the wider world of allowing a technology oligopoly to extend its dominance. 

In playful and profane language, Doctorow explains what has gone wrong, and how to put it right. Due out in October. 

No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, by Gardiner Harris, is a profound, and profoundly disturbing, exposé of alleged unethical practices at the well-known US healthcare group. 

His analysis is all the more striking for the fact that J&J has, over many years, crafted a reputation as an enlightened and purpose-led model of corporate capitalism.

 Finally, in Your Life is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters and How We Can Do Better (published as How Things Are Made in the US), academic Tim Minshall takes an eye-opening journey through the world of manufacturing. He argues that if consumers lose touch with how everything is produced, the system will become dirtier and more fragile. 

Two new judges join the panel for 2025: Nicolai Tangen, chief executive of Norges Bank Investment Management, and Adam Osborn, Schroders’ head of research, Asia ex Japan equities. The jury is again chaired by FT editor Roula Khalaf and the returning judges are: Mimi Alemayehou, founder and managing partner, Semai Ventures; Daisuke Arakawa, senior managing director for global business, Nikkei; Mitchell Baker, founder and former executive chair, Mozilla Corporation; entrepreneur Sherry Coutu; Mohamed El-Erian, president, Queens’ College, Cambridge university, and adviser, Allianz and Gramercy; James Kondo, chair, International House of Japan; Randall Kroszner, economics professor at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business; and Shriti Vadera, chair, Prudential and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The shortlist will be announced on September 24 and the winner of the award on December 3.

 

Police arrest German man for crypto investment scam that took an Australian police officer for $1.1 million

  

Man from Costa Rica gets 15 years prison for sweepstakes fraud; calls from Costa Rica claimed to be from government agencies; no one had won; collected over $4 million; operated more than 15 years

 
New FTC Data Spotlight that looks at business and government impersonation frauds that want you to turn over funds to keep them “safe”

• Reports by older adults losing $10,000 or more quadrupled since 2020
• Those who lost $100,000 or more increased sevenfold
• One third of the money lost was sent in crypto
• These scams also begin as tech support frauds
• $690 million reported lost to this type of scam last year

Boston: Thirteen charged in grandparent scam that operated from a call center in the Dominican Republic; took in $5 million
 
Foreign gangs operating in the US: Foreign fraud gangs have at least thousands of people physically in the US who help operate the frauds. Some make calls directly; others send mail or email and may help set up websites. And of course these US based helpers launder money, open bank accounts, recruit money mules or go to the homes of victims to pick up money (or hire Uber driver or other couriers).  Thus well over a hundred people from India have been convicted over this type of work.  And Romanians fly in, set up ATM skimmers, and fly out.  Many of these criminals are here illegally, either having crossed the border or overstaying tourist or student visas.  When caught taking part in frauds couldn’t/shouldn’t they be deported?
  

Fraud Studies: Here are links to the studies I’ve written for the Better Business Bureau: puppy fraud, romance fraud; BEC fraud, sweepstakes/lottery fraud,  tech support fraud, romance fraud money mules, crooked movers, government imposters, online vehicle sale scams, rental fraud, gift cards,  free trial offer frauds,  job scams,  online shopping fraud,  fake check fraud and crypto scams
 
Fraud News Around the world

• Kenya arrests Cameroonian man; wanted for scam selling nonexistent gold to Canadian investor
• California: Woman arrested in Thousand Oaks for advertising and“renting” properties she did not own
• India arrests 48 in July for a variety of cyber crimes
• New York: Two men (Chinese?) arrested for scheme to launder money from victims of tech support and other scams claiming your money was at risk; ran network of couriers that went to victim homes to get money or gold; collected $5 million but tried to get $18 million
• WhatsApp shuts down 6.8 million accounts used by fraudsters
• UK: London police arrest seven for sales of counterfeit football goods worth £5 million 
• US Treasury sanctions four people and 13 companies who worked with Jalisco drug cartel in timeshare resale fraud; operated from Puerto Vallarta
• New York AG sues banks for condoning fraud in the use of Zelle payment platform

Humor 

• Denmark zoo asks people to donate unwanted dogs to feed hungry predators
• Nebraska man stopped for no lights found driving naked and with truck full of stolen motorcycles and drugs

FTC and CFPB

• FTC sends $743,000 in refunds to victims of student loan debt relief scam
• FTC settles with two companies that sold fake health insurance; to pay $145 million

Benefit Theft 

• Atlanta: Jury convicts man of PPP fraud; got $3.4 million
• Chicago: Five indicted for PPP fraud that got millions
• Scranton: Man indicted for PPP fraud; got $850,000
• Detroit: Man from Beverly Hills charged with PPP fraud; got $3 million
• Buffalo: Man pleads guilty to $1.8 million PPP fraud
• Wisconsin: Three Chinese owned firms settle PPP fraud charges for $21.6 million
• West Virginia: Woman gets three years probation for PPP fraud; got $21,000
• Atlanta: Former federal employee and two others plead guilty to PPP fraud; got $550,000
• Brooklyn DA indicts man for PPP fraud
• Florida: Postal employee pleads guilty to PPP fraud
• Scranton: Man gets four years prison for PPP fraud; got $2 million

Scam Compounds

• War between Cambodia and Thailand arise in large part from scam compound money and tensions
• Philippines raids crypto scam compound; arrest 27 Chinese

Business Email compromise fraud 

• Viet Nam arrests two Nigerians, 19 Vietnamese, for laundering money from BEC frauds
• Texas: Fifteen men (many Nigerians?) arrested for laundering money from BEC frauds; handled more than $2.7 million

IRS and tax fraud

• Boston: Man pleads guilty to ID theft to steal tax refund; got $810,000
• New York: Nigerian man extradited from France; hacked tax preparers to do stolen identity refund fraud; got $2.5 million

Bitcoin and Crypto Fraud

• Virginia: Canadian man gets one year prison for online theft of Nonfungible Tokens (NFTS’s) by hacking accounts of artists
• Tennessee: Man (Chinese?) arrested for bitcoin investment scam when he went to victim’s home
• Thailand: Police arrest German man for crypto investment scam that took an Australian police officer for $1.1 million
• India freezes $4.8 million that came from scam that impersonated website of Coinbase, captured passwords to the real site and stole money
• New York: South Korean crypto king Do Kwon pleads guilty to fraud where he took in billions

Ransomware and data breaches

• 31% of ransomware victims hit with additional attacks within a year

ATM Skimming                                                         

• Los Angeles: Illegal alien from Romania who was living in Hollywood gets ten years prison for ATM skimming; also got tens of thousands of EBT cards

Jamaica and Lottery Fraud

• Jamaica: Police arrest seven for lottery scamming

Romance Fraud and Sextortion 

• New Orleans: Man (Nigerian?) gets five years probation for laundering money from romance fraud victims
• New Orleans: Jury convicts Nigerian man of romance fraud; funds went to China and the UAE
• Nigeria: EFCC arrests two for romance fraud