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Seventeen deputies at a South Florida sheriff’s office were charged with defrauding federal loan programs of nearly half a million dollars intended to help businesses that were struggling during the coronavirus pandemic, the authorities said, the New York Times reported. The employees of the Broward Sheriff’s Office were charged in separate cases of wire fraud in connection with collecting money from the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan, Markenzy Lapointe, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, announced at a news conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Thursday. Sheriff Gregory Tony of Broward County said that the deputies facing charges represented “a cross-section of multiple disciplines” within his agency. Eight of them, including a sergeant, work in the law enforcement department, and nine, also including a sergeant, are assigned to the department of detention.

Authorities arrested disgraced crypto hedge fund co-founder Su Zhu Friday, the latest detainment of a star from the crypto industry’s last bull cycle, YahooFinance.com reported. Singaporean authorities apprehended Su Zhu, 36, Friday afternoon at the country’s Changi Airport while he was attempting to leave the country. Singaporean courts placed a “committal order” against him according to Teneo, the court-appointed joint liquidators in the bankruptcy for Zhu’s firm, Three Arrows Capital Ltd. The court order, placed on Sept. 25, came as a consequence of Zhu’s “deliberate failure” to cooperate with Teneo’s investigations. He was sentenced to four months' imprisonment. The Singaporean courts have granted a similar order for Three Arrows' other co-founder, Kyle Davies, though "his whereabouts remain unknown at this point in time," said a Teneo spokesman. Separately, the Monetary Authority of Singapore earlier this month prohibited Zhu and Davies from conducting regulated investment activity for nine years each, according to Teneo.

A federal judge yesterday rejected Bill Hwang's bid to dismiss a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing him of fraud that led to the March 2021 collapse of his $36 billion firm Archegos Capital Management, Reuters reported. U.S. District Judge Paul Oetken in Manhattan said the SEC plausibly alleged that Hwang and Archegos, which is also a defendant, intentionally concealed the risks they were taking in their bid to manipulate markets through swaps transactions and to artificially inflate the value of their largest stock holdings. Oetken dismissed some fraud-based claims against former Archegos Chief Financial Officer Patrick Halligan, while letting the SEC pursue claims that Halligan aided and abetted fraud by former Archegos risk management chief Scott Becker. The judge also granted a request by the U.S. Department of Justice to put the SEC civil case on hold while it pursues related criminal charges against Hwang and Halligan. Oetken in a separate decision dismissed a U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission civil lawsuit against Archegos and Halligan, saying the regulator lacked power to sue over the swaps. Becker and William Tomita, who was Archegos' head trader, have pleaded guilty in the criminal case. Hwang's and Halligan's trial is scheduled to start on Feb. 20, 2024.

The former head of Wells Fargo's retail bank on Friday avoided prison time after pleading guilty to an obstruction charge related to the bank's sweeping fake-accounts scandal, Reuters reported. Carrie Tolstedt was sentenced to three years of probation including six months of home confinement by U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton in Los Angeles. She will also pay a $100,000 fine and serve 120 hours of community service. Tolstedt, 63, pleaded guilty in March to obstructing a government probe into misconduct at San Francisco-based Wells Fargo's retail and small business lending business, which she led from 2007 to 2016. She is the only top executive to face criminal charges over revelations starting in 2016 about Wells Fargo's sales culture, where employees opened millions of accounts and sold products that customers did not want in order to meet unrealistic sales goals. Tolstedt is also the rare top executive at a major U.S. bank to have faced potential time behind bars. None went to prison as a result of the 2008 global financial crisis.

A New Jersey man pleaded guilty yesterday to tax evasion, employment tax crimes, aiding the filing of false tax returns and making false statements in bankruptcy, according to a DOJ press release. According to court documents and statements made in court, Zeki Donuk, of Landing, operated a construction business first under the name Titan Builders LLC and later as Titan Steel Construction LLC (collectively, “Titan”). From at least 2016 through 2019, Donuk cashed checks payable to Titan instead of depositing them into business bank accounts. Donuk concealed the cashed checks and did not report them either as gross receipts on Titan’s corporate tax returns or as income on his or his wife’s personal returns. As part of his plea, Donuk admitted that from the third quarter of 2016 through the third quarter of 2017, he also did not collect, account for or pay over to the IRS employment taxes withheld from employees’ wages, despite a legal obligation to do so. For those quarters, Donuk also did not file quarterly employment tax returns on behalf of the businesses. In 2019, Donuk made false statements on documents he filed in a personal bankruptcy case. Specifically, he concealed from the bankruptcy court that he owned a vacation property in Pennsylvania, had signatory authority over certain bank accounts, owed tax debts to the IRS and operated his construction business as Titan Builders and Titan Steel.

Business and legal services provider Kroll said it’s cooperating with federal law enforcement after a hacker gained access to files that may have contained personal information for customers of bankrupt crypto platforms FTX, BlockFi Inc. and Genesis Global Holdco, Bloomberg News reported. Kroll said on Friday that it appears the attack occurred on or about August 19 and that the company is cooperating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Kroll took immediate action to secure the three affected accounts and “a full investigation is underway,” the company said in a statement. The hacker appears to have accessed files on Kroll’s cloud system that may have contained customer names, addresses, emails and other information on claims creditors have with the three crypto firms, the company said. An attacker used a so-called “SIM swap” attack to gain access to a Kroll employee’s T-Mobile mobile phone number, Kroll said. Generally, such scams involves someone taking over a target’s phone number by getting a phone service provider to transfers numbers to phones the attacker controls. Kroll and a handful of other private companies provide administrative services to companies in chapter 11. Kroll said that it has no evidence to suggest its other systems were impacted in the hack and warned customers of Genesis, FTX and BlockFi about potential phishing scams that could seek unauthorized access to their crypto wallets.