online fraud
| 3:35PM 10/19/2011
When Juliette Kimoto took to the stage to accept her crown as Mrs. Nevada in 2006, she seemed an obvious fit for the coveted pageant title. What she declined to mention, however, was that she was also engaged in an online operation that would eventually rob tens of thousands of people of $30 million.
| 4:45PM 7/15/2011
The Internet Crime Complaint Center's latest scam alert included too much to cover in one story, so we did one yesterday, while today's focuses on phony, Trojan-laden emails from the FBI and an email campaign targeting victims with an online blackmail scheme.
Alerts by the IC3, a partnership...
| 10:45AM 6/20/2011
The self-proclaimed "King of Infomercials" and snake oil salesman extraordinaire Donald Lapre was indicted this past Wednesday on more than 40 counts for his nationwide scheme to promote useless vitamins that defrauded nearly a quarter of a million victims out of more than $50 million.
A federal...
| 8:00AM 5/27/2011
A pair of serial scammers have been cited for contempt and fined more than $3 million by a federal judge for defying a 2008 court order settling a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit.
The contempt order was filed at the request of the FTC after the agency accused the defendants of targeting...
| 9:00AM 5/21/2011
The perpetrators of an online scam that fleeced consumers in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand out of nearly half a billion dollars with bogus free trial offers of acai berry weight-loss pills and other products are being sued by the Federal Trade Commission, which wants to shut...
| 2:00PM 2/18/2011
A Romanian con artist who helped defraud consumers with fake listings on sites like eBay and Craigslist pleaded guilty before a U.S. District Judge to one count each of wire fraud and conspiracy for his role in transferring and hiding the proceeds of an international crime ring.
Adrian Ghighina, a...
| 3:05PM 2/14/2011
The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) issued a trio of scam alerts today involving social networking, online shopping and malware embedded in a phony holiday email from the White House.
The IC3, a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), said the alert...
| 1:00PM 1/31/2011
If you like to try your luck online, stay away from CashBreak.com, an online gambling site many consumers say is a scam.
CashBreak.com makes the following boast on its homepage: "The Internets [sic] Greatest Games and they're all FREE!" The games include online poker, bingo, keno, slots, solitaire...
| 8:30AM 1/14/2011
A notorious online marketing scam that billed the credit and debit cards of thousands of unsuspecting consumers without their approval has been shut down by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.
The company, Peel Inc., was sued by Madigan in February 2010, for "cramming" consumers' credit cards...
| 3:30PM 7/07/2010
International scam artists defraud Americans out of more than $1 billion every year, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The FTC warns that global con artists are adept at reaching out across national borders via phone, email, snail mail, and web sites to trick unsuspecting victims...