Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Online fraud is no longer a fringe risk. A Couple who lost $42K in a sophisticated scheme are still locked in a dispute with their bank two years later, a reminder that once money is gone, getting it back can be a long, uncertain fight. I want to unpack how scams like this work, why…
Criminals no longer need bulky gadgets clipped onto card readers to drain your checking account. The newest generation of “shimmer” devices hides inside payment slots, quietly copying card data in the seconds it takes to buy gas or grab cash. By the time your bank flags suspicious withdrawals, the thieves may already have cloned your…
The Department of Homeland Security is quietly testing the limits of how far a domestic security agency can go to track political dissent online. By leaning on tech and telecom companies for data on people who criticize President Trump and his policies, officials are turning routine investigative tools into a pressure campaign that reaches deep…
The discovery of 890 Nazi-linked accounts at Credit Suisse has shattered long standing assurances that the bank’s role in the Third Reich’s finances was limited and well understood. Instead, a fresh probe has exposed a deeper, more troubling web of relationships that extended into the postwar era and helped key figures in the Nazi apparatus…
Russian crypto mining magnate Igor Runets, the founder and chief executive of BitRiver, is now at the center of a sweeping tax fraud case that threatens both his personal fortune and one of the country’s flagship digital asset infrastructure companies. Investigators accuse the entrepreneur of concealing significant tax liabilities, and a Moscow court has moved…
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has long relied on private companies to build its digital and physical infrastructure, but that relationship is starting to fray in ways that reach far beyond public boycotts. Under pressure from shareholders, employees, and foreign regulators, global firms are quietly restructuring, spinning off units, and rerouting investment to distance themselves from…
In North Texas, dozens of families thought they were watching their dream homes come to life on Instagram, only to discover they had been financing a mirage. More than 40 households paid a couple who styled themselves as lifestyle creators and design experts, only to be left with empty lots, half-built shells and a collective…
Google is paying $68 million to resolve a class action that accuses its voice technology of quietly capturing private conversations and turning them into data. The settlement centers on claims that the company’s virtual assistant listened when it was not supposed to, logging snippets of daily life that users never meant to share. At the…
The French technology group Capgemini is moving to sell a U.S. subsidiary that helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement track migrants in real time, a divestment that lands at the intersection of European corporate ethics and American immigration enforcement. The decision follows mounting scrutiny of how commercial data brokers and analytics firms quietly power the federal…
Prosecutors in Upstate New York say a trusted finance executive turned a family electrical business into his personal bank account, siphoning off more than $4 million over five years. The former Chief Financial Officer of an Albany firm is now accused of orchestrating a sprawling embezzlement scheme that allegedly touched everything from company checks to…