Dozens of people in orange shirts showed up at meetings to support Entergy's new power plant. But for many of them, it was just an acting gig. They were paid to show up and speak on the company's behalf. The Lens interviewed a few of them and reviewed messages outlining the astroturfing effort. By Michael Isaac Stein.

Right now, there is a black woman sitting in prison, reading about a Texas judge who was found guilty of the same crime she committed. She probably noticed that the judge was sentenced to five years’ probation in the same county that sentenced her to five years in jail. More than likely, she also noticed that she is black and the judge who was found guilty of turning in fake signatures to secure a spot in the Republican primary is white.

A quadriplegic man who emerged from a coma in 2004 claims Christian publisher Tyndale House published a fake near-death story about him going to heaven, which was concocted by his father after they survived a severe car accident. Alex Malarkey, 19, claims in a lawsuit filed Monday in Dupage County, Ill., that Tyndale House Publishers has made millions of dollars from a book his father wrote that falsely claimed he died and went to heaven, where he spoke to Jesus and the devil.

An Australian woman who faked having terminal cancer before scamming money from friends of her family has been jailed for three months. Hanna Dickenson, 24, accepted A$42,000 (£22,000; $31,000) after telling her parents that she needed medical treatment overseas. Her parents had received donations from their friends, a court was told. It heard Dickenson spent much of the money on holidays and socialising.

Navy leaders want Congress to commit billions of taxpayer dollars for two new aircraft carriers but no one can say that the design actually works. By Dan Grazier.

The largest Black Lives Matter page on Facebook is reportedly a fraud — run by a white man in Australia who used it to take in more than $100,000 in donations. The page was simply called “Black Lives Matter” and had nearly 700,000 followers, compared with the 322,000 for the verified page of the same name, CNN reported Monday. The bogus page has been suspended and online payment platforms PayPal, Patreon, Donorbox and Classy have stopped working with it.

The U.S. Navy wants to go all in on the USS Ford-class aircraft carrier program. Less than a year after the first-in-class ship’s commissioning — before it ever launched or recovered an aircraft, a first in history — the sea service is exploring options to buy similar vessels in bulk.... By Dan Grazier.

A former religious adviser to President George W. Bush has been accused by federal prosecutors of defrauding investors of $3.5 million. Pastor Kirbyjohn Caldwell and a business partner, Gregory Smith, sold millions of dollars of worthless Chinese bonds, telling investors to "remain faithful and that they would receive their money," according to documents obtained by ABC Houston station KTRK. Both men could face significant jail time and be forced to forfeit assets.

“I'm proud of being a leader of a poop cult,” Jillian Mai Thi Epperly once joked to fans of her signature recipe: a fermented slurry of salted cabbage that produces “waterfalls” of diarrhea. Here's the wild story of how she convinced thousands to believe her dangerous science, and how a grassroots movement shut her down when Facebook wouldn't. By Nidhi Subbaraman.

The Trump Organization's real estate partner in India is being accused of at least $147 million in fraud. Two global investment companies last month filed a criminal complaint with New Delhi police against IREO, accusing the company of engaging in "large-scale fraud," The Washington Post reported. The complaint said the company was "illegally siphoning off" at least $147 million of investor money and allege the number could actually approach $200 million.

Elderly people tend to get all the flak for falling prey to dubious online scams. But it appears that the trend may have nothing to do with seniority, according to an annual report from the Federal Trade Commission. In 2017, millennials reported losing money to fraud more often than those over the age of 70, the study showed.

Criminologists say they can't properly analyze crime trends without the missing data. By Pima Levy.

The effusive praise for this cryptocurrency is nothing but self-generated flimflam. By Christopher Whalen.

Fraud by Red Cross workers and others wasted at least $6 million meant to fight the deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the organization confirmed Saturday. The revelations follow an internal investigation of how the organization handled more than $124 million during the 2014-2016 epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

Not that any of the other 800 built before testing and design is complete will be, either. By Dan Grazier.

The agency fudged the numbers to prove Obama's signature climate regulation wasn't worth the cost, and still came up short. By Emily Atkin.

Alleged fraud put JPMorgan Chase hundreds of millions of dollars ahead; ordinary homeowners, not so much. By David Dayen.

Mexican rescuers teamed up and spent hours trying to save a girl trapped under the rubble at the Enrique Rebsamen elementary school in Mexico City after a powerful earthquake rattled the area. Now it's being reported that the girl, "Frida Sofía," never existed.

These skillfully and elaborately designed cards were distributed by merchants to their customers in the late 19th century. By Claire Voon.

Free-market boosters, including Betsy DeVos, promised that a radical expansion of charter schools would fix the stark inequalities in the state’s education system. The results in the classrooms are far more complicated. By Mark Binelli.