fraud

Danny Pang's Last Gamble

Owen Thomas · 04/28/09 12:19PM

A dead stripper wife. A gambling habit. A made-up résumé. All Southern California financier Danny Pang needed to complete the picture was an SEC investigation of an alleged Ponzi scheme. Now he has that, too.

Financier's Life Becomes Crazy Spy Movie

Hamilton Nolan · 01/07/09 10:50AM

Movie idea: the daughter of Jewish refugees flees Europe for Wall Street, strikes it rich, gains billionaire mobster clients, but is then forced into hiding by a deal gone wrong. Bonus: it's a true story.

Obama Donor List Full of Fraud!

Pareene · 12/01/08 04:51PM

The Obama team has released its first transition donor list! Among the usual gang of employees of the nation's largest defense contractors (Boeing, Lockheed, and Raytheon have four donors between them!), trial lawyers, radical academics, and government employees, we found this transparent example of yet more illegal donations. Just look at who "Doug Berman," $500 donor, claims to work for.

Anne Hathaway Caught Up in Vote-Rocking Scam

Pareene · 10/28/08 09:09AM

Anne Hathaway may be sweetness and all-American good looks on the surface, but what do we really know about her? How would Americans feel if they knew that she palled around with felons? She says Raffaello Follieri was just a guy from the apartment on Fifth Avenue that she shared with him, but they were totally doing it as he pulled off a crazy scam involving the Vatican. When he was convicted of fraud and money laundering, Hathaway severed ties. But she's still connected to a sleazy voter registration syndicate that now stands accused of filing false registrations in New York, Virginia, Ohio, and Florida. That's right—Anne Hathaway's in the pocket of Rock the Vote. This "organization representing the intersection of young people, politics and popular culture" was started in 1992 by some sleazy Hollywood entertainment industry types and they'd been trying to swing elections ever since with nihilistic "grunge music" and godless celebrities. The group lets would- be election defrauders print out unlimited voter registration forms they access from their "Xboxes" and "iPhones." Then Rock the Vote helpfully sends all the forms to the wrong place and no one is registered. Democracy! [Update: Rock the Vote says the New York Board of Elections screwed up! No Times correction yet!] Anne Hathaway got tied up in this modern-day Tammany Hall, of course:

NY Sends Absentee Voters 'Osama' Ballots

ian spiegelman · 10/11/08 02:06PM

Hundreds of absentee voters from Rensselaer County, NY, were sent ballots offering them the exciting opportunity to cast their vote for Democratic candidate "Barack Osama." Election officials are saying it's an honest mistake. Except that the ballots in question were supposed to be proofread by at least six people. So, in other words, election fraud!

Obama Donors Include Noted Scandinavian Poet Jgtj Jfggjjfgj, Hugh Jass

Pareene · 10/10/08 10:26AM

So the New York Times has a great story on Barack Obama's shady illegal fundraising. Because the system is utterly broken and Obama is taking advantage of that fact to win this election. His unprecedented fundraising is democracy at its worst! Of course millions in donations from thousands of random people is not so bad, and McCain's taking advantage of the GOP bundling system that Bush developed which is really just a laundering service. Still, hey, lots of people are donating way more than is legal to Obama's campaign and that campaign is maybe not being as vigilant about checking up on this as they should be. Though honestly this story is primarily an excuse to print the funny fake names and occupations of these mysterious illegal donors:

Raffaello Follieri Pleads Guilty, Has Bad Hair Day

Hamilton Nolan · 09/11/08 08:32AM

International playboy and fraud superstar Raffaello Follieri is no longer just an alleged swindler. As was rumored earlier this week, he pleaded guilty yesterday to 14 counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering in connection with a Catholic church property investment scam. He had to give up $2.4 million, along with all that nice jewelry he gave to his charmed girlfriend Anne Hathaway. Next time give a poor man a shot, Anne! Now Follieri's personal grooming is paying the price for his foolish decision not to listen to Lizzie Grubman:

Arrested Anne Hathaway Ex Still Collecting Donations

Ryan Tate · 06/24/08 11:55PM

Federal prosecutors did not snare Raffaello Follieri's charitable foundation yesterday when they had the Italian businessman arrested for fraud and money laundering. The case against Follieri, at present, focuses on his alleged crimes against private, profit-seeking investors and not the Follieri Foundation he chairs, which supposedly vaccinates children in third-world countries. But the Feds' fraud and money-laundering charges against Follieri Group raise questions about the trustworthiness of the foundation to which it is so closely tied — questions made all the more acute by the fact that Follieri Foundation is itself under investigation by New York's attorney general after apparently failing to file U.S. tax disclosure forms. The foundation, [formerly] directed by Annie Longon, pictured at left via her Facebook profile (via same name/university/city as her Follieri-linked LinkedIn profile), is still raising funds, on the off chance you trust Follieri bookkeeping: [UPDATE: Longon wrote in to say she left Follieri companies in early 2007. For whatever reason, the foundation had not yet removed her name from its website at the time of publication.]

The Case Against Raffaello Follieri

Hamilton Nolan · 06/24/08 11:31AM

The Smoking Gun has the entire criminal complaint against Anne Hathaway's ex-boyfriend Raffaello Follieri, the hustling con artist charged with fraud and money laundering earlier today. Much of the information came out in previous stories and investigations, but it's still pretty stunning to see the extent of the guy's fraud laid out all at once. Payoffs, luxury, deception, and a crooked reporter—all in there. And you can understand why Hathaway stayed with him so long; if your boyfriend had an unlimited pot of (other people's) money to fly you around the world with, you'd like him too:

Those 'Undiscovered' Amazon Tribesmen: Bullshit Indeed

ian spiegelman · 06/22/08 11:50AM

Our own Alex Pareene was so money when he called bullshit on that supposedly unknown tribe photographed in the Amazon. It was all a ruse by a concerned environmentalist! "[I]t has now emerged that, far from being unknown, the tribe's existence has been noted since 1910 and the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that 'uncontacted' tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry. The disclosures have been made by the man behind the pictures, José Carlos Meirelles, 61, one of the handful of sertanistas- experts on indigenous tribes-working for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency, Funai, which is dedicated to searching out remote tribes and protecting them."

Former billionaire caught in the long tail of dot-bomb securities fraud

Jackson West · 05/16/08 03:20PM

Former CEO of PurchasePro Charles Johnson is facing 20 years in jail for his role in stock fraud at the company. An earlier prosecution of Johnson ended in mistrial, but this retrial included the original allegations plus an obstruction of justice charge related to the first effort. The Las Vegas-based PurchasePro sold enterprise software for business-to-business transactions online. PurchasePro executives worked closely with AOL dealmakers, who were implicated in the scheme to manufacture positive sales numbers in 2001 in order to puff up PurchasePro's once-astronomical stock price. AOL cut a deal earlier to defer prosecution. Other executives at PurchasePro had already plead guilty. PurchasePro went bankrupt in 2002, and the assets were scooped up by Perfect Commerce.

Red Herring owes the taxman $2 million, ex-employees say

Owen Thomas · 03/18/08 08:00AM

The longevity of troubled tech publisher Red Herring was a mystery until one ex-employee enlightened me: Publisher Alex Vieux simply doesn't pay his bills. What a brilliant way to achieve positive cash flow! Alas, Vieux has encountered a creditor who won't be stiffed: the IRS. The agency is looking into Vieux's Herring for what may be $2 million in unpaid payroll taxes, ex-employees who have been contacted by investigators have told me. Vieux is experienced at dodging the taxman: Farley Duvall, a longtime lieutenant, told colleagues he'd fled French police seeking to seize company documents in Paris, and drove in the middle of the night to Switzerland, where he rebuilt the Herring's European operations. Now Swiss authorities are asking questions about — you guessed it — unpaid taxes. But it's the American taxman who may put Vieux behind bars.

More French Joie De Vivre

Joshua David Stein · 01/24/08 07:30AM

Also today in wacky France, a trader at Société Général, the second-largest bank in France, perpetrated a fraud worth 7.1 billion dollars. Unsurprisingly, he's been fired. He also, unsurprisingly, disappeared. [Daily Mail]