Results tagged “fraud” from The Daily Nugget

Bo Stefan Eriksson, the con man that milked millions from video game company Gizmondo.com, escaped charges of grand theft and fraudulent concealment when the jury in his trial became deadlocked 10-2. Eriksson gained worldwide notoriety when he crashed a red Ferrari Enzo doing over 160 MPH on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu earlier this year.

Eriksson was not charged with stealing the red Enzo he destroyed in that crash but of taking the two other sports cars that prosecutors said he acquired in England, a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren and yet another black Ferrari Enzo. Prosecutors have already said that they would retry the case. He also faces trial on charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm that authorities said they found when they searched his $6 million Bel-Air home in March.

Sadly, this guy may never be charged with the embezzlement of millions from Gizmondo.com. Corrupt executives often get away with stealing money from corporations. Mostly because shareholders do not want to sue in civil court. Some are just embarrassed they were conned and want to forget the whole thing. Others feel it's futile to try an pierce the corporate shroud and get to the stolen money in personal accounts.

We all know that crime (with a gun) doesn't pay. However, it seems that crimes with pens work out pretty well for the criminals. If you know how to manipulate the world's complex financial systems to your own benefit you can walk away with a king's ransom. if this guy survives a few trials, he may be chillin' with millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. Will karma eventually get him?

Jeffrey Skilling, former CEO of Enron, was sentenced to 24 years in prison today.

A U.S. District judge erased Ken Lay's criminal conviction citing an earlier case in which the U.S. Court of Appeals extinguished a defendant's entire case pending appeal due to his death. The reasoning was that the defendant hadn't had a full opportunity to challenge the conviction and the government shouldn't be able to punish a dead defendant or his estate. This means that that Ken Lay's estate is off the hook for the $43.5 million in ill-gotten Enron gains that the U.S. government would have received as restitution as part of his conviction. The U.S. government must now sue the Ken Lay estate like any other litigant in civil court.

I guess that if you steal hundreds of millions of dollars and fail to get away with it, you can always kill yourself while on appeal and leave your heirs a pretty nice nest egg. Who knew? Some people claim that he either killed himself or faked his own death. It turns out that he may have "died" on the advice of legal counsel. Surely laws will have to be changed going forward to deal with this, since many CEOs are old farts that may die before the legal process is through with them.

I sold my Canon 10D camera at auction on Ebay and thought nothing when I received a question from one of my potential buyers. The nice girl, named Brenda Zimmerman, who I assumed to be a nice Jewish girl, gave me a story that she was on vacation in Indonesia and needed the camera shipped there instead of her home in New York if she won the auction. Fine.

The nice girl wins the auction and I don't hear from her for a few days. All of the sudden I see that I receive payment for the camera plus shipping from a Thomas Weir. Again, I think nothing of it because the same girl explains in an email that her boyfriend paid for the camera and gives me an address of where they are both staying at in Indonesia. Oh, okay, no problem.

Had I been home, I would have printed the shipping label, slapped it on the package, and headed off to the post office to ship the camera via Global Express Mail. Unfortunately, I was at the office and could not readily ship the package. I thought I would just print the label when I got home, slap it on the package, and get to the post office the next morning. All good right?

"We get caught laundering money, we're not going to white collar resort prison. No, no, no. We're going to Federal pound me in the ass prison."
-- Michael Bolton played by David Herman, Office Space, 1999

Kenneth Lay and Jeff Skilling were found guilty today of conspiracy and fraud for their role in misleading the public about the true financial health of Enron, whose collapse is one of the biggest corporate scandals in history. Lay and Skilling commented after the trial that they would have their anuses surgically enhanced to make them much smaller. "We don't want to have to worry about dropping the soap in the prison bathroom, and I'm kind of a klutz" said Lay while addressing reporters at the post-trial conference. Skilling added, "We really wanted our anuses permanently closed but were told by doctors that was impossible."

Lay and Skilling were released on $5 million bond and relinquished their passports to the court. However, they were not assigned to home confinement until sentencing. Is that a good idea? Surely these guys have tens of millions of dollars put away somewhere. Couldn't they charter a private plane to leave the country? The court better have some FBI agents following these mofos around because the prospect of "pound me in the ass prison" could entice them to skip their planned anal surgery and just go on the lam.

In February, a $1 million Ferrari Enzo crashed doing 160 MPH on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. Surprisingly enough, the driver of the car survived the crash. From there the story turns into a mix of anti-terrorism agents, imported stolen cars, counterfeiting of Swedish currency, and a huge stock pump and dump scheme. It turns out that the driver, Stefan Eriksson, and his circle of friends milked millions from Gizmondo.com and may be a part of a Swedish organized crime ring. Eriksson was finally arrested last night in his Bel-Air home. Riveting story, reminds me of a less successful con man I once knew.

Former Tyco CEO, Dennis Kozlowski, and ex-CFO Mark Swartz were found guilty Friday of stealing about $600 million from the manufacturing conglomerate. This was the second trial for the duo, since the first ended in a hung jury.

In this trial, prosecutors left out sordid details about Kozlowski's lavish spending during his tenure as Tyco's top executive, including a $1 million birthday party he threw for his wife on the Italian island of Sardinia and a $6,000 shower curtain allegedly purchased with company funds. They still went down, and now face 15 to 30 years in prison.

Today, Adelphia founder, John Rigas, and his son, Timothy Rigas, were sentenced to 15 and 20 years in prison respectively for their part in embezzling $100 million from the company and hiding $2.3 billion in off-balance-sheet debt prior to the company collapsing into bankruptcy three years ago. They should consider themselves lucky, since they could have both been sentenced to life in prison.

The moral of these stories: it doesn't pay to be greedy. How many homes and yachts do you really need? All of these guys were extremely wealthy before they decided to lie, cheat, and steal. The Rigas family will pay $1.5 billion back to investors--how much of their net worth is that!? Perhaps it was ego that made them do it, who knows? Now, a big guy named Bubba will make them "do it," repeatedly.

One of the fastest growing Internet scams on the web, besides the silly Nigerian 419 scam, is the fake escrow scam. This is where fake escrow sites are used for big ticket items to steal money or the big ticket item being bought or sold via auction.

On MSNBC today, a dentist is out $55,000 for the car he never got--and never will. He should had read MSNBC's expose on the scam on December 17th. Make sure this doesn't happen to you.

The ex-CEO of a failed dot-com was sentenced to eleven years in prison and fined almost $3MM for fraud and tax evasion after stealing a mere $4MM from investors. He lured investors with rigged demos and used the money to buy a home, a car, and other "stuff." The story sounded vaguely familiar to me. Damn, iMind allegedly raised $15MM total through its final days--at that rate that's almost 44 years for the mofo that ran that company. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Ex-CEO of Tyco can't make bail because a judge froze $600MM of his assets. The guy needs to post $10MM to secure a $100MM bond to stay out of jail on Riker's Island. The judge stated that he can't use any of his frozen assets or even his ex-wife's house as collateral to secure the bond because he may have obtained the money to buy that house illicitly while at Tyco. Time to pucker up.

It's about time that corporate executives that commit fraud are criminally charged instead of hiding behind the corporate shroud. Still, they are prosecuting only the biggest offenders and there are a lot of small fish that will continue to go unpunished.

That's too bad because there are plenty of people that would love to see this cockhandler (the fat bastard next to Arnold) in prison. Not a white-collar prison, no, no, no, a Federal "pound me in the ass" prison. By the way, if you haven't done so already, see Office Space.