During a four year period starting in 2008, executives of two sham cancer charities paid themselves and their fundraisers more than $65 million, according to figures released by the Federal Trade Commission. Court documents filed by the FTC and the attorneys general of all 50 states show that the Cancer Fund of America and a related charity called Cancer Support Services paid a total of $65.5 million, which represented...

It’s disgusting, it’s duplicitous, and apparently, it’s being done in Uber cars across the United States. A number of reports have surfaced claiming that Uber drivers are planting fake vomit in their cars to collect cleaning fees from unsuspecting customers. The latest alleged victim of such a scandal is Manhattan-based art director Meredith Mandel, who says that her Uber driver placed yellow vomit around his car’s dashboard...

A federal grand jury has returned a new indictment against Hillsboro resident Winston Shrout, accusing him of defrauding U.S. financial institutions by issuing bogus documents and failing to file six years of income tax returns. The grand jury returned an indictment charging Shrout with 13 counts of making, presenting and transmitting fictitious financial instruments and six counts of willfully failing to file income tax returns. He's accused of making and issuing more...

A Dallas anesthesiologist who submitted bogus payment claims — including one when he was actually under anesthesia for surgery himself — has been found guilty of bilking millions from the U. S. government. Dr. Richard Ferdinand Toussaint Jr. was convicted on all seven counts of fraud Thursday after a four-day trial in a Dallas federal court. Toussaint, 58, is the co-founder of Forest Park Medical Center, which had a history of paying physician kickbacks before it went bankrupt.

Italian lawmakers voted on Tuesday to stiffen a legislative decree that Italian olive oil producers and other critics charged would decriminalize olive oil counterfeiting. Commissions in both houses of Parliament approved the decree but recommended that the government ensure that criminal law prevail over administrative sanctions, such as simple fines, in cases of commercial fraud.

On 13 May 2012, friends of Dana Dirr, a 35-year-old surgeon in Saskatchewan, were greeted with a distressing message when they logged into Facebook: “URGENT PRAYERS NEEDED.” A post written by Dirr’s father informed her friends that Dana was fighting for her life after a head-on car accident. Dana had been airlifted to the very same trauma centre where she worked as a surgeon; in fact, she was meant to be on duty that night.

I would like to tell you about the biggest lie in book publishing. It appears in the biographies and social media profiles of almost every working “author” today. It’s the word “best seller.” This isn’t about how The New York Times list is biased (though it is). This isn’t about how authors buy their way onto various national best-seller lists by buying their own books in bulk (though they do). No, this is about the far more insidious title of “Amazon Bestseller”...

Christopher Russell owned a small bar in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, but, like a lot people these days, figured he had better odds hooking up online. Russell was 40 and going through a divorce, so he wasn't seeking anything serious. When he saw an ad for the dating site Ashley Madison, which boasted 36 million members and the tagline, "Life is short, have an affair," he decided to check it out. "It seemed like a very active community," he says.

“Jeremy Wilson,” now at Rikers Island facing fraud charges, has used dozens of aliases as a professor, a commando, numerous executives and an Irishman, among other cons.

I was raised in a household that worshiped baseball. This meant I spent a good chunk of my weekly allowance on baseball cards. I was a collector. My father was a collector. It was serious business for us, yet even after opening hundreds of packs together, the thrill of seeing which cards we would get never lost its luster. In a way, it was my childhood version of a slot machine, complete with an unhealthy amount of anxiety that either gave...

A report from New York's attorney general points to abusive practices in the market for live-event tickets on sites such as StubHub. Computer programs snap up seats faster than humans can.

Nine executives at Israeli travel agencies have been arrested on suspicion of fixing the price of high school students' trips to former Nazi death camps, including Auschwitz. Police say they are investigating allegations of a secret price-fixing arrangement by companies who organise the trips for students. Investigators have raided the homes of executives and frozen bank accounts. At least six travel agencies are accused of violating competition rules.

In 1966, Stanford University psychologists Jonathan Freeman and Scott Fraser observed an interesting phenomenon in their experiments: someone who has already agreed to a small request—like opening the door for you—would become more, not less, likely to agree to a larger request later on. In one study, they asked 150 housewives in Palo Alto, California, if they would sacrifice two hours of their time: a research team of five or six people would come...

It's a boss's worst nightmare. You return from a trip to find that hundreds of thousands of dollars has been transferred out of company accounts - apparently at your instruction. But you have no idea what your accountant is talking about - you didn't give any instructions. This is what happened to Carole Gratzmuller, boss of a medium-sized French company called Etna Industrie.

For months now, Dell customers have been targeted by phone scammers who have way more information about their computers than they should. That’s led to suspicion that Dell may have been the victim of a hack. As one of the largest computer OEMs in the world, it’s easy to see why Dell would be a target. They’ve got a lot of customer data stored on their servers. It certainly looks as though at least some portion of a Dell database fell into the wrong hands...

Your next flight might include a mandatory trip through the body scanner…

The allegations read like a movie plot: a lottery industry insider installs undetectable software giving him advance knowledge of winning numbers, then enlists accomplices to play those numbers and collect the jackpots. And they secretly enrich themselves for years — until a misstep exposes them.

Every dollar in Mark Zuckerberg’s private charity is a dollar wrested from public coffers — and democratic control.

Dozens of New York City-area energy industry executives and truck drivers were arrested Tuesday as part of a law enforcement probe into a suspected scam on customers. DNAinfo reports the bust includes over 40 "owners, executives and truck drivers from some of the city's largest fuel oil companies" who police accuse of rigging oil trucks to shortchange customers on heating oil. The alleged scammers, who DNAinfo reported include eight owners of...