DOJ Recovers $2.5B in Healthcare Fraud, False Claims in 2018

The DOJ collected more than $2.5 billion in judgments and settlements related to healthcare fraud and false claims in 2018.

018 was a bad year to be a healthcare fraudster.  The Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced that $2.5 billion of the total $2.8 billion recovered under the False Claims Act can be attributed to fraud and improper claims from healthcare providers during the fiscal year.

This was the ninth consecutive year that civil healthcare fraud settlements and judgments have topped $2 billion, officials added.

Thanks to the DOJ’s efforts, a number of state Medicaid entities recovered additional millions not included in the federal total. read more »

‘Flash-Crash’ Moves Hit Currency Markets

Wild moves in the currency market are sending investors scurrying for answers

It took seven minutes for the yen to surge through levels that have held through almost a decade.

In those wild minutes from about 9:30 a.m. Sydney, the yen jumped almost 8 percent against the Australian dollar to its strongest since 2009, and surged 10 percent versus the Turkish lira. The Japanese currency rose at least 1 percent versus all its Group-of-10 peers, bursting through the 72 per Aussie level that has held through a trade war, a stock rout, Italy’s budget dispute and Federal Reserve rate hikes.

Traders across Asia and Europe are still seeking to piece together what happened in those minutes when orders flooded in to sell Australia’s dollar and Turkey’s lira against the yen. read more »

Happy 10th birthday, bitcoin. It’s amazing you still exist

False prophets, a rogues’ gallery of blaggers, and fiendish technical complexity: the cryptocurrency has defied them all

Bitcoin, the Big Daddy of cryptocurrencies, which celebrates its 10th birthday today, rarely inspires temperate or informed debate.

For its detractors – mostly elderly bankers and economists – it is tulip-mania, moonshine, hi-tech smoke and mirrors. For its most fanatical adherents – techies and latter-day hippies – bitcoin is not merely a viable currency, but salvation: a universal panacea, not just to combat governmental ineptitude or malevolence, and poverty, but to end them. Hallelujah and kumbaya.

The sneerers cite the rampant criminality in the ranks of the cryptosphere. It is true, in the 10 years since bitcoin was born on a couple of desktop computers – becoming an entity worth more than the M1 money supply of Argentina – its retinue has accommodated an incredible rogues’ gallery. There have been old-fashioned cony-catchers, saltimbancos and bubblers who did a runner with other people’s money in the time-honoured manner, but also drug-dealers, murderers and blaggers – not to mention the lethal dreamers and false prophets.

But as the stalwarts of crypto will gleefully point out, the desperados and flimflammery encountered in these new forms are but a mirror of the better-tailored dishonesty found in the City of London or any of the world’s financial centres. There is hardly a bank left that has not been caught money-laundering, market-rigging, misselling or involved in miscellaneous misdeeds. read more »