Financial Fraud Investigations Overwhelm FBI

(NEWSER) - A short-staffed FBI is laboring to keep up with white collar crime linked to the nation's financial crisis, the New York Times reports. FBI officials predicted millions of dollars' in mortgage fraud years ago, but the Justice Department wanted agents focused on counter-terror. When the FBI warned of a fraud "epidemic" in 2004, only 15 of its 13,000 agents were on the case. More»

Service for the deaf was abused by Nigerian scammers

(NEWSER) - The Justice Department has accused AT&T of bilking the government out of more than $16 million by purposely allowing Nigerian fraudsters to abuse a service intended to help deaf Americans. AT&T says it's just following FCC rules requiring it to offer a free IP Relay service, which allows the deaf to type messages for an operator to read. The government then reimburses AT&T for the calls at $1.30 per minute, Bloomberg explains. But the Justice Department says 95% of the calls AT&T facilitated were from foreign con artists, mainly from Lagos, Nigeria. More»

Family, critics say shooter George Zimmerman is being protected

(NEWSER) - Almost a month after the killing of unarmed teen Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and Florida's Department of Law Enforcement have agreed to get involved, the Miami Herald reports. The agencies will probe the case amid accusations from the teen's family and civil rights leaders that the local police department manipulated its investigation so that its findings synced up with the story told by George Zimmerman, the Neighborhood Watch volunteer who shot Martin and has not been arrested. More»

Cabinet secretaries to meet on wasteful spending

(NEWSER) - The Justice Department has managed to recover some $5.6 billion lost to fraud over the 2011 fiscal year, officials will announce today. Civil fraud accounted for some $3.4 billion, with the rest attributable to criminal fraud, insiders tell the Washington Post . Much of the money was recovered by so-called Medicare Strike Fraud Forces, which track down millions in fraudulent claims. It's yet another step forward in the crackdown on fraud: Such recoveries have climbed 167% since 2008. More»

Scheme could cost federal pension agency more than $1B

(NEWSER) - The FBI charged 11 people yesterday in connection with a massive fraud scheme that saw hundreds of Long Island Rail Road workers allegedly fake disabling injuries so that they could retire early and collect their pensions. Among those arrested are two doctors who together approved cases handing $121 million to workers who allegedly made up or exaggerated their ills—and unless the government can stop the disbursements, those cases could wind up costing a federal pension agency $1 billion, the New York Times reports. More»