U.S. Supreme Court weighs challenge to SEC in-house judges

U.S. Supreme Court justices on Monday appeared divided over a challenge to the constitutionality of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s selection of in-house judges to enforce investor protection laws in a case involving a former radio host and investment adviser backed by the Trump administration.

The court heard arguments in an appeal by Raymond Lucia, who was given a lifetime ban from investment-related work by an SEC administrative law judge for misleading investors in his “Buckets Of Money” retirement wealth presentations. The case could expand the control by the president and political appointees over officials in various federal agencies. read more »

Britain, headquarters of fraud

The UK is at the centre of global corruption: shell companies that launder dirty money can be set up with ease.

Officials get fed up with accusations that Britain is a cesspool of dirty money; that they do too little to check the wealth hidden behind shell corporations. They grouse among themselves that their critics overlook the work they’re doing to expose the money flows and to drive out the corrupt.

When they do get a win, therefore, they trumpet it. Last month, Companies House successfully prosecuted someone who had lied in setting up a company, the kind of white-collar crime committed by the sophisticated fraudsters who fleece ordinary Brits every day, and the government went large. “This prosecution – the first of its kind in the UK – shows the government will come down hard on people who knowingly break the law and file false information on the company register,” crowed business minister, Andrew Griffiths, in a press release.  read more »

Banker Finds He Has ‘Even More Enemies Than I Thought’

The governor of Latvia’s central bank, a pillar of Europe’s financial system for years and a zealous champion of austerity, has long been lambasted by his critics as a heartless enforcer of economic dogma. In a play that recently ended a long run at the National Theater, his character is stabbed to death onstage.

“The same thing is happening to me in reality,” Europe’s longest-serving central bank chief, Ilmars Rimsevics, said in an interview last month just after the Latvian Parliament voted 55 to 0 asking him to resign because of a swirl of corruption allegations.

At the center of a tumultuous real-life drama that has left him under investigation on suspicion of taking bribes and has destroyed the country’s biggest locally owned private bank, Mr. Rimsevics, never a popular figure, has been taken aback by all the hostility. “I have even more enemies than I thought,” he said. read more »

Zelle, the Banks’ Answer to Venmo, Proves Vulnerable to Fraud

The personal payment platform Zelle is flourishing. But so are fraudsters, who are exploiting weaknesses in the banks’ security.

Big banks are making it easy to zap money to your friends. Maybe too easy.

Zelle, a service that allows bank customers to instantly send money to their acquaintances, is booming. Thousands of new users sign up every day. Some $75 billion zoomed through Zelle’s network last year. That’s more than twice the amount of money that customers transferred with Venmo, a rival money-transfer app.

But the same features that make Zelle so useful for customers, its speed and ubiquity, have made it irresistible to thieves. Hackers and con artists have used the system to steal from victims — some of whom had never used Zelle or even heard of it until someone used it to clean out their bank accounts. read more »

5 Indicted in Alleged $80 Million California Recycling Fraud

California has charged five people with defrauding the state's recycling program out of $80.3 million — the largest alleged fraud scheme in the program's history, officials said Thursday.

The owner and four employees of Recycling Services Alliance Corporation are charged with swindling the state's beverage container recycling program over several years by accepting recyclables purchased in other states and faking the paperwork, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced.

The state Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery said it's the largest ever alleged fraud involving the 5- or 10-cent deposits consumers pay on certain beverage containers. The self-funded program has recently been having substantial financial problems leading to the closure of many of the state's private recycling centers. read more »