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Paintings by Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky and the Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico were allegedly used by a New York art dealer to lure investors and collectors into paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for works he never owned or didn’t have a right to sell, Bloomberg News reported. At least three lawsuits filed this week against the dealer, Ezra Chowaiki, accuse him and the Park Avenue gallery in which he’s the president and a minority shareholder, of carrying out a variety of frauds. The gallery, Chowaiki & Co. Fine Art Ltd., filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 13. David Dangoor, the gallery’s Swedish director and majority owner, was also sued with buyers accusing him of knowing about Chowaiki’s frauds and failing to warn them.

A federal jury in Manhattan on Wednesday found a Kansas City, Mo., businessman guilty of fraud for running a $220 million payday lending scheme that charged illegally high interest rates and made loans to consumers who did not authorize them, Reuters reported. The U.S. Department of Justice said Richard Moseley was convicted on six counts including wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, after a 2½-week trial. Moseley, who had pleaded not guilty, faces up to 20 years in prison on the most serious charges at his scheduled April 27, 2018 sentencing. Prosecutors said that from 2004 to September 2014, Moseley's businesses made "predatory" loans to more than 620,000 Americans, often downplaying the financing costs and charging effective annual interest rates that could top 700 percent. The defendant spent some of the millions of dollars he made from the scheme on a Mexico vacation home, luxury cars and country club dues, prosecutors said.