Category: _enforcement

A federal jury convicted two men today for engaging in a scheme to defraud Medicare Advantage and Medicaid managed care plans of over $3.8 million. According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Ikechukwu Udeokoro, 47, of North Bergen, New Jersey, owned Meik Medical Equipment and Supply (Meik), a durable medical equipment supplier that was located in the Bronx, New York. Ayodeji Fasonu, 56, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, was Meik’s manager. Through Meik, Udeokoro and Fasonu billed Medicare Advantage and Medicaid managed care plans for hundreds of expensive patient support systems that were never provided to patients or caregivers. These support systems included large devices that were designed to assist with lifting immobile patients and patients in nursing homes. In reality, Udeokoro and Fasonu provided patients with recliner chairs that had a seat lift feature. Between December 2010 and February 2014, Udeokoro and Fasonu fraudulently billed Medicare Advantage and Medicaid managed care plans more than $3.8 million and were paid approximately $2.4 million.

A former Arkansas State Senator was sentenced today to 46 months in prison in the Eastern District of Arkansas for accepting multiple bribes and tax fraud in connection with a multi-district investigation spanning the Eastern and Western Districts of Arkansas and the Western District of Missouri. According to court documents, from 2010 through 2017, Hutchinson stole and misappropriated thousands of dollars in state campaign contributions for his own personal use and then filed false federal income tax returns from 2011 to 2014 to conceal his conduct. In addition, Hutchinson was hired as outside counsel by Dr. Benjamin Burris, an orthodontist who owned and operated orthodontic clinics throughout the state of Arkansas. In exchange for payments and legal work, Hutchinson pushed legislation beneficial to Burris. Hutchinson was provided legal work to conceal the corrupt nature of his arrangement. Hutchinson stole over $10,000 in state campaign funds for his own personal use and also falsified his 2011 tax returns, including failing to report $20,000-per-month-payments he received from one law firm and other sources of income he knowingly and intentionally concealed from his taxes.

A former Jacksonville company CEO was sentenced yesterday to 32 months in prison for willfully attempting to evade the assessment of his federal income taxes. According to court documents and statements made in court, in 2015 and 2016, Jason Cory, 49, of Jacksonville, was a manager at a New York-based IT services company and from 2017 through 2019, he was the CEO of a different IT services company based in Jacksonville. From 2015 through 2018, Cory used his positions to cause more than $1.5 million to be deposited into the bank accounts of Gambit Matrix LLC, a shell company he controlled. As CEO, Cory caused transfers to Gambit Matrix under the false pretense that they were payments for consulting services that had never been provided.

Department of Justice U.S. Attorney’s Office Northern District of California FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Friday, January 27, 2023 After two-week trial, federal jury found Miller and his company both guilty of conspiracies involving racketeering, mail and wire fraud, and money laundering, in addition to substantive mail fraud and conspiracy against the United States. SAN FRANCISCO – A federal jury convicted David…

In a complaint first announced in October 2022, the FTC said that Chegg failed to protect the personal information it collected from users and employees. For example, the company stored users’ personal data on its cloud storage databases in plain text and, until at least 2018, employed outdated and weak encryption to protect user passwords. As a result of its poor data security, Chegg experienced four data breaches that exposed the personal information of about 40 million users and employees, including users’ email addresses and sensitive scholarship data such as their dates of birth, sexual orientation and disabilities, as well as financial and medical information about Chegg employees.

The FTC’s order requires Chegg to implement a comprehensive information security program, limit the data the company can collect and retain, offer users multifactor authentication to secure their accounts, and allow users to request access to and deletion of their dat

A federal court convicted a Washington state man yesterday for engaging in a child exploitation enterprise. According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Christopher William Kuehner, 38, of Bremerton, was a prominent member of the website “Rapey.su,” which was dedicated to, among other things, child sexual exploitation. After becoming a member of the website, Kuehner repeatedly induced and enticed minor girls to produce child sexual abuse material for both him and the other members of the website.

The Justice Department announced today that it has concluded there is reasonable cause to believe that the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (LDOC) routinely confines people in its custody past the dates when they are legally entitled to be released from custody, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. 

A California man was sentenced today to five years in prison for defrauding investors of more than $15 million in connection with a scheme to misappropriate investor funds for his own personal use. Joey Stanton Dodson, 58, formerly of Indio, pleaded guilty in the Northern District of California to one count of wire fraud on June 14, 2022. Dodson fraudulently raised over $15.6 million from more than 50 investors and misappropriated $1.3 million in investor funds, which he used to pay for his personal expenses and to repay earlier investors in unrelated entities known collectively as Duke Equity.

Home finance companies General Commercial Group Pty Ltd (formerly known as Urban Commercial Group) and Eden Capital (Australia) Pty Ltd (formerly known as Southside Lending) have each been penalised $50,000 by the Federal Court for failing to cooperate with the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA). General commercial director Dale Brendan Heremaia and his son, Eden Capital director Benjamin Eden Heremaia,…

A former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI New York Counterintelligence Division and a former Soviet and Russian diplomat were arrested Saturday on criminal charges related to their alleged violating and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and conspiring to commit money laundering and money laundering.

On January 4, 2023, the Irish Data Protection Commission (“DPC”) announced the conclusion of two inquiries into the data processing practices of Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”) with respect to the company’s Instagram and Facebook platforms. As a result of the investigations, the DPC fined Meta a combined €390 million for breaches of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) and,…

Mun Chol Myong (Mun), 55, a national of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), was sentenced today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to time served of 45 months’ imprisonment for multiple money laundering offenses.

A complaint was unsealed this morning in federal court in Brooklyn charging Anatoly Legkodymov, a Russian national and senior executive of Bitzlato Ltd. (Bitzlato), a Hong Kong-registered cryptocurrency exchange, with conducting a money transmitting business that transported and transmitted illicit funds and that failed to meet U.S. regulatory safeguards, including anti-money laundering requirements. Legkodymov was arrested last night in Miami…

A Texas military contractor pleaded guilty on Jan. 12 to rigging bids on public military contracts in the state of Texas. According to court documents, Aaron Stephens, 53, conspired with others to rig bids on certain government contracts from May 2013 to January 2018 in order to give the false impression of competition and to secure government payments in excess…

Italy’s No. 1 fugitive, a Mafia boss convicted of helping to mastermind some of the nation’s most heinous slayings, was arrested Monday when he sought treatment at a private clinic in Sicily after three decades on the run. Matteo Messina Denaro was tried in absentia and convicted of dozens of murders, including helping to mastermind, along with other Cosa Nostra…

A New York judge on Friday fined Donald Trump’s family business the maximum penalty possible of $1.6 million for committing tax fraud. The sum, paltry to the billionaire real estate developer’s amassed fortune, is nevertheless symbolically significant as the ex-president eyes the White House again amid a host of legal woes. The Trump Corporation and Trump Payroll Corp., entities of…