Blogs: Posts Tagged ‘ fraud ’

A reporter typically gets a half dozen charity solicitations each day in the email, and most go to the trash. This one a couple weeks back caught my eye because of one phrase: “WWII Navy Seal.” Hi Edward, Earl Littman, fmr Navy Seal (Team 1 !) has a new mission. He has a plan to...
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Legislative auditors who tested the state’s 1.3 million homestead property tax credits found that between 8,400 and 109,000 recipients are not eligible. (The wide range is due to the fact that the auditors examined only 114 properties). Following on reports in the Baltimore Sun more than a year ago, the auditors report (PDF link)...
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At the start of this blog, I predicted that the financial crash would cause the government to spend huge money bailing out the people who caused it, adding a great deal to the national debt and sparking a crisis of confidence in the country’s ability to repay it, which would lead to a policy...
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U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced a giant sweep of scammers today during a noon press conference at the Department of Justice. More than 500 people have been charged in various Ponzi schemes, mortgage frauds, securities frauds, and the like during the past three and a half months as “Operation Broken Trust” fanned out...
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compulsive gambling, whether considered a disease or a moral failing, just might be at the root of our trouble
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Something that occurred to me as I learned of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s civil fraud suit against Goldman Sachs Friday (this New York Times piece has a link to the complaint): Who was buying mortgage-backed paper in mid 2007 and what were they thinking? Anybody whose skull wasn’t filled with oatmeal knew by...
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New York Times Opinionator blogger William D. Cohan steps in it today with this long plea for a presidential pardon for ex Goldman Sachs arbitrageur Robert Freeman, who two decades ago pleaded guilty to mail fraud, served four months in Club Fed, and paid his million dollar fine with a personal check. It was...
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There are many nuances to former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling’s argument, now before the Supreme Court, that he should be released from the minimum-security federal prison that houses him. There is the question of venue—should he have been tried in Houston, where the bulk of the 5,000 people who lost their jobs (and $2...
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“Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs,” the New York Times noticed on Saturday in a story about people it dubbed “the new poor.” The story is a good reminder to the ruling class. One should never forget that millions of rich douchebags pretend to have no idea how the majority of us live....
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Your tax dollars at shirk | Image by Win McNamee/Getty Images via Photo Journal The Sun has some predictable drivel today regarding the state’s all-important “millionaire” head-count. Seems it’s gone down. By 30 percent! And this is a terrible thing! And it’s all because of taxes and Democrats! Goddamn Democrats. As the Sun reports,...
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The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story today explaining that AIG has gotten back several billion dollars in collateral it posted last year against losses in the credit-default swap market. But, most of the “bad” contracts, which now look not-so-bad, were “closed out” by the government bailout, meaning that AIG lost that money...
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The Sun and the Wall Street Journal ran stories today about patient identity theft at Johns Hopkins that prompted the hospital to issue a warning letter to patients. The letter, available from WSJ‘s health blog, went out to 46 victims, 526 possible victims who will receive credit monitoring at Hopkins’ expense, and 10,200 patients...
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