Category: Crime

Mercer Financial Advice has been ordered by the Federal Court to pay a $12 million penalty for breaching fee disclosure obligations and for wrongly charging fees to customers, ASIC has reported. “This is a significant penalty for a financial advice provider,” said Sarah Court (pictured above), ASIC deputy chair. “Mercer failed in its obligation to provide fee disclosure statements to…

WASHINGTON: US inspectors announced fines against China-based firms Thursday, as part of a broader effort to hold US-listed Chinese companies up to American auditing standards amid simmering geopolitical tensions. These included PwC affiliates in Hong Kong and China, alongside a Chinese audit company. The $7.9 million in penalties unveiled by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) represent some of the…

CISA (Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency) is warning that threat actors breached a U.S. water facility by hacking into Unitronics programmable logic controllers (PLCs) exposed online. PLCs are crucial control and management devices in industrial settings, and hackers compromising them could have severe repercussions, such as water supply contamination through manipulating the device to alter chemical dosing. Other risks include service…

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has sanctioned the Sinbad cryptocurrency mixing service for its use as a money-laundering tool by the North Korean Lazarus hacking group. A cryptocurrency mixer is a server that allows people to deposit crypto, which is mixed among many different wallet addresses to help prevent it from being accurately traced. The mixing service takes a…

  American healthcare company Henry Schein has reported a second cyberattack this month by the BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware gang, who also breached their network in October. Henry Schein is a Fortune 500 healthcare products and services provider with operations and affiliates in 32 countries and a revenue of over $12 billion reported in 2022. It first disclosed on October 15 that it…

  As China’s embattled shadow banking giant Zhongzhi Enterprise Group faces a criminal probe, lawyers and analysts are assessing the damage to investors. One estimate puts that at about US$56 billion (S$74.9 billion). More than three quarters of investor cash would be lost, with just 100 billion yuan (S$18.7 billion) being recovered from debt of as much as 460 billion…

Three Palestinian students attending US colleges were shot on Saturday night in Burlington, Vermont, and were being treated for injuries on Sunday, according to the students’ former school in the West Bank. Ramallah Friends School said in a Facebook post on Sunday that three of its graduates had been shot near the University of Vermont Campus – Hisham Awartani, who…

AUTRYVILLE: Deputies responding to a call about shots fired in North Carolina on Sunday found four people shot to death in what appeared to be a campsite for homeless people, authorities said. An initial review of the crime scene indicated someone killed three people before killing themselves, Sampson County Sheriff’s Capt. Eric Pope told WRAL-TV. Two men and two women…

BOGOTA: Former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe will appear before the attorney general’s office next week over a 1997 paramilitary massacre, authorities said Thursday. While Uribe was governor of the Antioquia department, a group of 150 right-wing paramilitary members killed at least 15 people in the village of El Aro. Last week, paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso, at a hearing with Colombia’s…

Healthcare SaaS provider Welltok is warning that a data breach exposed the personal data of nearly 8.5 million patients in the U.S. after a file transfer program used by the company was hacked in a data theft attack. Welltok works with health service providers across the U.S., maintaining online wellness programs, holding databases with personal patient data, generating predictive analytics,…

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) confirms they suffered a cyberattack after ‘SiegedSec’ hacktivists leaked stolen human resources data online. INL is a nuclear research center run by the U.S. Department of Energy that employs 5,700 specialists in atomic energy, integrated energy, and national security. The INL complex extends over an 890-square-mile (2,310 km2) area, encompassing 50 experimental nuclear reactors, including…

Beijing has defended its prosecution of two Canadians for espionage, after The Globe and Mail reported that Michael Spavor blames intelligence work done by Michael Kovrig for their nearly three-year-long detention. Mr. Spavor is seeking a multimillion-dollar settlement from Ottawa, two sources told The Globe, alleging he was arrested in China in late 2018 because he unwittingly provided intelligence on…

The Canadian government says two of its contractors have been hacked, exposing sensitive information belonging to an undisclosed number of government employees.  These breaches occurred last month and impacted Brookfield Global Relocation Services (BGRS) and SIRVA Worldwide Relocation & Moving Services, both providers of relocation services to Canadian government employees.  Government-related information stored on compromised BGRS and SIRVA Canada systems dates…

An Ontario justice has thrown out a proposed $200-million class action lawsuit against legal software provider Dye & Durham Ltd. DND-T over price hikes and broken promises by the Toronto software company. Ontario Superior Court Justice Edward Morgan last month dismissed the action brought by real estate law firms and D&D clients Burford Law Professional Corp. and Tais Davis. D&D…

With Russian tanks and troops descending on Ukraine in early 2022, Cyprus became a hotbed of financial activity. The island country has long been known as an offshore transit point for the fortunes of Russian billionaires, and as sanctions loomed over many of them last year, Cyprus financial services firms fielded a series of urgent demands to transfer funds and…

BEIJING: A Chinese man wanted for allegedly embezzling millions of yuan (hundreds of thousands of dollars) from his company and then fleeing to Morocco was extraditedback to China on Saturday, the Ministry of Public Security said. The man, a financial executive at the company, used passwords for its bank accounts to transfer money to his personal account, the ministry said…