DEA

UPDATED 8:33 P.M. EDT U.S.A. There must be some long faces at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Secret Service today. That’s because two federal agents once assigned to a Task Force investigating the illicit Silk Road marketplace have been charged with federal crimes. Carl M. Force, 46, of Baltimore, was a DEA […]

David Eduardo Helmut Murcia Guzman (David Murcia), the MLM huckster whose pyramid scheme targeted the poor in Latin America and laundered money for a Colombian narcotics operation, has been sentenced to nine years in a U.S. federal prison. Murcia, 30, also faces a 30-year prison sentence in Colombia after his release from a U.S. jail. […]

The long arm of U.S. law — and the long memory of U.S. law enforcement — has resulted in the guilty plea in Southern Florida of a Colombian fugitive linked to the defunct Medellin cocaine cartel and the late Pablo Escobar. In 1989, federal prosecutors said, Sigifredo Maya directed a money courier to deliver $3 […]

SPECIAL REPORT: UPDATED 2:27 P.M. ET (U.S.A., FEB. 9) Federal court and web records show that at least three of the 14 purported Forex dealers named defendants in a major sweep of unregistered firms last month by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission advertised that they accepted funds from Perfect Money. Perfect Money is a murky […]

A Colombian national implicated in an international conspiracy to launder drug money has been sentenced to 45 months in prison, federal prosecutors announced. Meanwhile, another figure in the alleged scheme — Robert Hodgins, the operator of Dallas-based Virtual Money Inc. (VM) — remains at large, prosecutors said. Hodgins is wanted by Interpol on a warrant […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: It is common for fraudsters to claim that “offshore” locations insulate HYIPs, autosurfs and other investment-fraud schemes from prosecution in the United States. It is equally common for purveyors to claim the schemes are harmless. The story of the alleged DMG pyramid scheme is one in which prosecutors allege a monstrous multilevel-marketing company […]

Kaboom! It has happened again. Explosive court filings by the government show that kneejerk apologists and defenders of High Yield Investment Programs (HYIPs) and autosurfs are quickly running out of cover when they assert that anything is noble or even real about the programs they relentlessly push for their share of purported profits from introducing […]

Federal prosecutors have announced five convictions in an international money-laundering case involving drug proceeds and the use of “stored-value” debit cards. (See subhead below.) The cases were brought by the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2008 as a result of an undercover operation. The debit cards used in the transactions were provided by Virtual Money Inc., […]

The U.S. Secret Service feared AdSurfDaily President Andy Bowdoin had become aware of scrutiny into his business affairs and planned to flee the country, according to a 37-page affidavit originally filed under seal in the case. Meanwhile, the affidavit revealed that a key Secret Service investigator in the case formerly was a member of a […]