Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Elizabeth Holmes, once celebrated as a visionary of Silicon Valley, is now a convicted fraudster serving an 11 year sentence and ordered to pay $452 million in restitution to victims of Theranos. After losing her appeals, she is turning to the one person who can unilaterally change her fate, President Donald Trump, asking him to…
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is facing a formal ethics complaint that cuts to the heart of how the Department of Justice polices the fast‑moving world of cryptocurrency. At issue is whether the official overseeing key financial crime cases could fairly regulate an industry in which he personally held a significant stake while also serving…
Criminals have figured out that the easiest way to beat bank security is to go straight to the source: the person holding the card. Instead of hiding behind anonymous phishing emails, they are now showing up, literally and figuratively, at front doors to separate people from their debit cards and PINs. I want to walk…
House and federal investigators are now examining how Rep. Ilhan Omar went from reporting no assets to being linked to an estimated $30 million in family wealth, a trajectory some critics have flatly labeled “not possible” under normal circumstances. At the center of the storm are opaque business interests tied to her husband, questions about…
Bill Hwang, the once obscure hedge fund manager whose leveraged bets detonated into a $10 billion margin-call disaster, is now asking the White House to wipe his record clean. After an 18-year prison sentence and one of the most spectacular collapses in recent Wall Street history, his plea for mercy forces a fresh reckoning with…
The woman at the center of Minnesota’s staggering $250 million welfare fraud scandal now says she has “lost everything,” a plea for sympathy that collides head‑on with the scale of the damage she helped inflict. Jurors found Aimee Bock, the founder of Feeding Our Future, guilty of orchestrating a vast scheme that siphoned pandemic meal…
A couple who watched $42,000 vanish in a slick online scam and then spent two years fighting their bank is not an outlier. It is a snapshot of how fast digital fraud can drain a life’s savings and how slow the system can be to help victims claw anything back. I want to walk through…
Federal prosecutors say a small group inside President Donald Trump’s tech-focused DOGE initiative crossed a bright red line: tapping into the Social Security Administration’s most sensitive systems and quietly moving data to an outside server. The Department of Justice now alleges that DOGE staffers working inside the agency tried to create a live replica of…
A Houston woman picked up her phone believing she was saving her life savings from criminals. By the time she hung up, every account she relied on for her future had been emptied, the result of a fake fraud alert so polished it appeared to come from her bank and even the FBI. Her story,…
Federal officers poured into Los Angeles’ Fashion District this week, turning one of the city’s busiest commercial corridors into the latest flashpoint in the national immigration fight. What unfolded in a maze of wholesale showrooms and sidewalk vendors was not only a high profile enforcement action, but also a stress test of how far the…