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CALGARY - A former Calgary Transit worker has admitted stealing more than $375,000 from the city over seven years by palming coins off a conveyor belt, stashing the money in his locker and packing it into a knapsack before he left work each day. David John Hamilton, 56, pleaded guilty Thursday in provincial court to theft over $5,000. (Calgary Herald)
TOKYO - Almost 450 government bureaucrats in Japan have admitted receiving cash or other gifts and favours from taxi drivers used for official journeys. It has been dubbed the "pub taxi scandal" because often cooler boxes with cold beers were provided in the back of cabs for the bureaucrats. (BBC) PREVIOUS: Life in the limo lane for Ottawa's driven
JERUSALEM - An American businessman told prosecutors Tuesday that he handed cash-stuffed envelopes to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and suspected that some of the money went to funding Olmert's fondness for fine hotels and first-class flights. (AP)
ORLANDO - A federal judge sent Lou Pearlman off to prison for 25 years Wednesday, then offered him what he called the "keys'' to his jail cell. For every $1-million Pearlman recovers for the investors he scammed, he'll get a month trimmed off his sentence. (Tampa Bay Times) MORE: Pearlman sentenced to 25 years
MONTREAL - The judge didn't buy Josie Cioffi's story that she was under her co-accused's spell when she defrauded her employer of $4.3 million. (Montreal Gazette)
It was supposed to be a stress-free investment for Florence and Jim Langford. After all, the retired Saskatchewan couple was only looking for a little extra income to supplement their retirement savings. It all started when Florence decided to take an investment course with a company called Whitney Canada. (W-Five)
MIAMI - AEY, Inc., the weapons company headed by 22-year-old Efraim E. Diveroli, had their $300 million weapons contract suspended by the federal government on Friday. (Trans World News) PREVIOUS: Supplier under scrutiny Afghans sent obsolete ammunition
CALGARY - Penny Marcy Myslichuk, who handled accounts for wills and estates, dependent adults, family trusts and a large mixed account for Bennett Jones, pleaded guilty to seven counts of fraud over $5,000 and one count of forgery. (Calgary Herald)
TAMPA - Lou Pearlman, the gregarious mastermind behind boy bands such as 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys, is now admitting his role in a different kind of choreography: a Ponzi scheme. (AP)
SAN LUIS OBISPO - A transplant surgeon could face up to eight years in jail after being charged with trying to hasten the death of a patient. (Telegraph UK)
MOSCOW - Former Russian minister Yevgeny Adamov has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison for abusing his office and embezzling more than $30m. (BBC) MORE: Adamov sentenced
VANCOUVER - Five of six downtown Vancouver hotels bought by the BC government for low-rental housing were bought from one man, developer Robert Wilson, who made a profit of $10 million on the sales in less than two years. (Vancouver Province) RELATED: Rat hotel faces hefty fines
EDMONTON - Lax security at Alberta's privatized registries has produced an embarrassing export trade in fraudulent drivers' licences that is threatening highway safety across the country. (Edmonton Journal)
KATHMANDU - "I am just a doctor, not a kidney dealer," Amit Kumar told reporters as he was brought to Kathmandu after being arrested Thursday in the southern Nepalese town of Chitwan. (CBC) MORE: Kumar denies role in harvesting ring 'Dr. Horror' nabbed
TORONTO - A man who posed as a high-flying financial adviser and befriended small investors, bilking some out of their life savings, has pleaded guilty to defrauding six people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Toronto Star)
Nigeria graft boss strikes again ABUJA - Nigerian anti-corruption agents have issued an arrest warrant for an eighth former governor. Lucky Igbinedion of Edo State is accused of stealing more than $24M through three front companies. (BBC) PREVIOUS: Nigeria corruption tsar sidelined Nuhu Ribadu
Forces find illegal driftnet fishing COMOX - A multinational operation on the high seas involving a Canadian Forces Aircraft from CFB Comox has turned up photographic evidence of 10 vessels involved in driftnet fishing, a practice banned by the United Nations. (Victoria Times Colonist) MORE: High seas stake-out |
CALGARY - The builder of a northwest condo complex whose "systematic failure" in construction led to a $10-million repair bill likely won't face any lawsuits related to the building. (Calgary Herald)
MIAMI - All it took to bilk the federal government out of $105 million was a laptop computer. From her Mediterranean-style townhouse, a high school dropout named Rita Campos Ramirez orchestrated what prosecutors call the largest health-care fraud by one person. (Washington Post)
ROME - Police have arrested 13 doctors from a clinic in Milan who investigators suspect performed needless and sometimes fatal operations to make more money. (AP)
VANCOUVER - A Vancouver physiotherapist is facing a charge of defrauding ICBC of thousands of dollars after an investigation alleged she was billing the insurance company, as well as WorkSafe BC, for patient treatments she never performed. (Vancouver Sun)
Ethiopian court sentences Mengistu ADDIS ABABA - Ethiopia’s Supreme Court sentenced former dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam to death, along with 17 senior officials of his regime. The sentence was handed down in his absence because he is living in Zimbabwe. (AFP) MORE: Court sentences Mengistu to death 'Red Emperor' sentenced to death
CALGARY - Lindsey Elizabeth Alexander, 54, wrote 107 cheques to either herself or MasterCard during the first half of 2004, defrauding Centaur Import Motors of $512,200, including penalties and interest paid by the owners to the Canada Revenue Agency. (Calgary Herald)
OTTAWA - Canada is laden so thick with business taxes it requires the average major company 11 employees working full-time, year-round simply to comply with them, says a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers. (CanWest) REPORT: Total tax contribution survey
MISSISSAUGA - A 41-year-old man has been arrested in connection with an Internet fraud involving a phoney hockey school and league, scamming as much as $100,000 from international junior hockey players, Peel regional police say. (CanWest) MORE: Ex-owner of Junior A team arrested Former Derbys owner out on bail
CALGARY - A Vernon man and woman have been charged with bilking 11 vintage car fans in the US and Sweden out of $400,000 in an international Internet scam, police say. "They used Internet auction sites like EBay, Craigslist and an auction site called Hemmings Auto News," said Calgary police Const. Dean Nichol. (Vancouver Province) MORE: Vintage car scam
TORONTO - A senior executive at Maple Leafs' parent company Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment has resigned and five other employees have been fired after the company learned of ticket irregularities. (Toronto Star)
NEWMARKET - In his financial heyday, strip club owner Riccardo DiGiuseppe drove a Ferrari and captained a 60-foot luxury yacht called My Way. Yesterday, DiGiuseppe, 61, heard himself sentenced in Newmarket court to a six-year term in prison and ordered to pay a $2 million fine, at the conclusion of one of the Greater Toronto Area's longest and most complicated tax evasion prosecutions. (Toronto Star)
Developer leaves buyers in limbo KELOWNA - The Willows condominium development in the Okanagan town of Lake Country is in receivership, leaving about 78 purchasers in limbo. The condos were being built by Divergent Environments, a Victoria-based company. (CBC)
VANCOUVER - A group of former high school buddies has been ordered to pay $510,000 to the Insurance Corporation of BC for staging a series of crashes as part of an insurance fraud scheme. (Vancouver Sun)
PARIS - Gilbertte Van Erpe, 67, was arrested last week in Nice after nearly two years on the run. Police allege she made between C$21.7M and C$25.66M by persuading 5,000 Chileans and 25,000 Peruvians to invest savings into what they believed was miraculous "cheese paste." (Star News)
TORONTO - A few years ago Lushan Lu subdivided his large Scarborough home into an illegal rooming house, creating 18 bedrooms and eight bathrooms. Now he's returning it to its original form. That comes after he pleaded guilty in court this summer to city zoning bylaw infractions. He and co-owner Zhuan "May" Wang were each fined $5,000. If Lu and Wang had just one person per room in their house they would collect more than $7,000 each month. (Toronto Star)
TORONTO - Walter Garrick, 37, is facing 16 charges of theft and fraud after he was arrested on Thursday by Toronto police fraud investigators. (Toronto Star) |
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OTTAWA - Krista Erickson, an Ottawa-based CBC-TV reporter who CBC said fed questions to a Liberal MP during the Mulroney-Schreiber hearings in December, has been transferred to Toronto after the broadcaster found her actions "inappropriate." (CP) PREVIOUS: CBC releases response to complaint CBC does right Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez Honore-Mercier (electoral district) |
An increasingly hostile consumer climate is making Canadians who serve your drinks, staff your flights and ring up your purchases feel like they've accepted an invitation to their own hanging just by showing up for work. Across the country, employee stress and incidents of customer conflict are soaring, and physically and verbally abusive customers are making headlines (CanWest) |
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VICTORIA - The Oak Bay Marine Group's former vice-president of finance has been charged with theft and fraud after more than half a million dollars was diverted from the company's bank accounts. Graeme Bryson, 43, of Victoria, has been charged with theft over $5,000 and fraud over $5,000. (Victoria Times Colonist) |
Kerik enters 'not guilty' plea WHITE PLAINS - Bernard Kerik, former New York City police commissioner and failed nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security, on Friday pleaded not guilty to federal corruption and tax fraud charges, which were announced in an unsealed indictment. (Fox) MORE: Bernard Kerik indicted |
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TORONTO - Five Toronto-area residents face more than 100 fraud-related charges in a real estate scam that sold parking lot spaces as condos, police say. Bank employees, lawyers and real estate agents were all working together to defraud Toronto Dominion of $3.8 million, Det. Craig Ellis explained. (Toronto Star) |
Shipwreck, treasure, insider trading WASHINGTON - The US Securities and Exchange Commission said on Thursday that Ernesto Tapanes, 39, agreed to pay more than $216,000 to settle insider trading charges in the case involving the 18th century shipwreck, code-named Black Swan. (Reuters) MORE: Canadian guilty of insider trading |
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Rev. Al soaks up boycott bucks NEW YORK - Anheuser-Busch gave him six figures, Colgate-Palmolive shelled out $50,000 and Macy's and Pfizer have contributed thousands to the Rev. Al Sharpton’s charity. In some cases, they hire him as a consultant. The cash flows even as the US Attorney's Office in Brooklyn has been conducting a grand-jury investigation of National Action Network's finances. (NY Post) |
Investigation of Sharpton an offshoot |
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VANCOUVER - In his native Ukraine and for several years in Toronto, Walter Datsko was an accountant and family man who drove his two daughters to movie nights in a beat-up Oldsmobile. (Vancouver Sun) |
EDMONTON - A 61-year-old paralegal was sentenced Monday to more than five years in prison after she "greased the wheel" of a $30-million mortgage fraud believed to be the largest in Alberta history. (Edmonton Journal) |
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Canadian con artists get 24 years He was a Canadian who seemed to be living the American dream on the sunny California coast - a yacht and a 2006 Ferrari, country club and golf memberships, a sprawling, multimillion-dollar mansion in a wealthy enclave at seaside Monterey. To dozens of his friends and clients, Jay Zubick was a popular and trusted investment adviser from Toronto. (Windsor Star) |
Soccer club accuses ex-president HAMILTON - The near-bankrupt Dundas Girls' Soccer Club is suing its former president for allegedly siphoning club cash into his own pocket. The club launched a lawsuit last week against Wayne Potter, who ran the club for the past five years, alleging he took more than $81,000 out of club coffers for his own use. (Hamilton Spectator) |
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LONDON - MPs hope to stop details of their expense claims being made public by changing the system so that they do not have to submit receipts. Days after the High Court ordered the publication of every receipt submitted by MPs, a committee reviewing parliamentary expenses is proposing that they should be able to claim the full £23,000 second-home allowance automatically as an annual “block grant”. (Times online) |
No MP prosecutions over expenses Scandal deepens contempt for MPs Committee on Standards in Public Life Health minister's expenses scam The high life offered to MPs through expenses Thinktank attacks basis for party funding reform Public subsidies to MPs 'rising' Paying for the party .pdf |
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OTTAWA - A group opposed to public-private hospital partnerships claimed Friday it had documents suggesting the provincial government approved at least one project based on faulty information - and it's concerned the same thing may have happened with the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre. (CanWest) MORE: Documents expose flaws in cost comparison of P3 hospital financing |
An Aussie conman who left a global trail of debt, deceit and powerful enemies before disappearing 10 years ago faked his own death says Rakesh Saxena. Tim Gatland who boasted about supposed links to the plutonium and arms trade and had seemed to relish making enemies in the Thai military and government, the Russian mafia and even the CIA. (Asian Pacific Post) PREVIOUS: One lie leads to another |
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Jailed chef steamed lawyer free EDMONTON - Brenda Martin found it ironic that prominent lawyer Marco Antonio del Toro wandered into the Guadalajara courthouse on Monday, the day of the final hearing in a legal nightmare that has seen her spend two years in prison. Both Martin and del Toro once worked for Canadian con man Alyn Waage. Del Toro and Martin both told Mexican investigators in 2001 they didn't know the money they received from Waage was fraudulently obtained - but their treatment was distinctly different. (Journal) |
Conman's mansion for sale, by his lawyer Mexican justice all about bribes Canada could have freed Martin Canadian languishes in Mexican jail Leader of $60M internet scam pleads guilty |
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ALBANY - New York Governor Eliot Spitzer may have made a smart move when choosing lawyers to help him avoid criminal charges for soliciting prostitutes. Two were top attorneys in the same office handling his case. (Bloomberg) |
Fame of Spitzer call girl grows |
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EDMONTON - An Edmonton man who duped his fiancee, his barber and a childhood friend into taking part in a mortgage fraud scheme alleged to involve as much as $30 million was sentenced Tuesday to three years in prison. Harkamaljit (Tony) Kahlon, 30, pleaded guilty to 12 counts of fraud in connection with the alleged multimillion-dollar scam. (Edmonton Journal) |
Behind the Capital's slum mafia NEW DELHI - The latest crackdown on the Capital’s “slum mafia” by the Central Bureau of Investigation has brought to the fore a deep nexus between building contractors and government officials behind fraudulent allotment of land meant for resettlement of displaced slum dwellers. (The Hindu) MORE: Land scam: Congress in crisis management mode |
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HAMILTON - A Brantford accountant and two members of her family are accused of stealing about $1.5 million of retirement funds from a group of elderly Hamilton nuns. (Hamilton Spectator) |
Liberia discovers 'ghost' workers Liberia's government says it has found more than 7,000 'ghost' workers on its payroll - employees who do not actually exist, or do not work for it. (BBC) |
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Adviser charged with $3M fraud KEMPTVILLE - Police arrested Bruce Elmore, of Kemptville. Police accuse him of defrauding clients of $3 million over a five-year period. He is charged with two counts of fraud over $5,000. (Ottawa Citizen) |
Car dealer fined $7M for fraud VANCOUVER - A Vancouver car dealer was sentenced to two years in jail and fined $7 million in court yesterday for defrauding Ottawa of that amount in a long-running GST fraud. (Vancouver Province) |
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Kwantlen student fund misspent VANCOUVER - More than three-quarters of a million dollars in student funds was misspent, a forensic audit of Kwantlen University College student association finances has found. . (Vancouver Sun) |
MONTREAL - The RCMP have busted what they describe as a Montreal-based network that pirated copies of DVDs, mostly of defunct U.S. television series, and sold them over the Internet. (Montreal Gazette) PREVIOUS: Ripoff Report: tvboxset.com |
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VANCOUVER - A commission panel ruled Brian Anderson perpetrated a fraud, made misrepresentations and distributed securities illegally under his Frontier Assets and Alpha Program investments. (Toronto Star) |
Dad cries foul over student loans CAPE BRETON, NS - A Cape Breton man whose daughter suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car crash four years ago says the federal government is harassing him over her unpaid student loans. (CBC) |
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Interest rates of 720% only fair WINNIPEG - The head of a payday loan company says he has every right to charge borrowers interest rates of more than 700%. Leo Sorensen, of Sorensen's Loans 'Til Payday, was among the first people to speak at regulatory hearings that opened today in Winnipeg. (CP) MORE: Payday loans hearings in city |
VANCOUVER - In a city that complains long and loud about the state of its taxi service, no one it seems wants to delve a little bit deeper to find out why a cabal of four companies hold a monopoly on the industry in Vancouver. (Asian Pacific Post) RELATED: Taxi firm settles with blind man refused ride because of guide dog |
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TORONTO - An alleged con man accused of bilking friends and family of more than $8-million, has been arrested again, charged with defrauding an American businessman of more than $1-million while on bail. Adam Spencer, 26, was arrested on Friday by Toronto police - six months after his parents offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep their oldest son out of jail. (National Post) |
Former PM faces more questioning PARIS - Former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, prime suspect in a smear campaign scandal, is to be summoned before investigating judges in September for a new round of questioning, judicial officials said Sunday. The scandal was allegedly aimed at smearing the reputation of Nicolas Sarkozy - the new president of France. (AP) |
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VICTORIA - Ian Thow, who defrauded clients out of millions of dollars while he was working as an investment adviser in Victoria, has been nailed with the largest fine in BC Securities Commission history. The former Berkshire Investment Group vice-president was fined $6 million and banned for life from the province's capital markets. (Victoria Times Colonist) |
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