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Dyron Hart, a twenty year old former student of Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, Louisiana, was just convicted of communicating threats through interstate commerce by making racist death threats through a fictitious Facebook account. On November 5, 2008 Hart created a Facebook account with a fictitious name and used a picture of a white supremacist for the profile. Hart, an African American, used the profile to pretend to be a person upset about the election of President Obama and used t...

  The soon to be world's largest brewing company, InBev (brewer of beers such as Bass, Stella, Labatt, and Becks), was ordered today to divest of its assets in Labatt Beers. The issue stems from InBev's merger with Anheuser-Busch that began on July 13, 2008. At the time, Anheuser-Busch was the largest American brewer capturing 50% of the U.S. market, and InBev was the largest European and South American brewer making it the world's second largest brewer. On November 14, 2008 the Department o...

The Swiss bank UBS, the world's largest private bank, who has been under investigation by the Department of Justice over alleged tax evasion claims has reportedly reached an agreement with the DOJ to settle the case this morning. UBS will be required to disclose the names of clients to settle the case. The Swiss Government has expressed its disapproval of the actions taken by the US to force this disclosure.   The details of the agreement have not yet been disclosed, and it is unknown how ma...

The FBI unsealed an indictment against Marcus Patmon for wire fraud in connection to trying to sell a stolen Pablo Picasso etching titled "Le Repas Frugal." The etching was stolen from a West Palm Beach, Florida art gallery on May 22, 2008. Patmon represented himself as the true owner of the painting in his knowing attempt to sell the stolen etching. The etching is valued at $300,000. Among other things, Patmon faces a $250,000 fine and 20 years in a federal jail. More from the FBI here.  

This story is especially for my local readers, but the rest of you should enjoy it as well. In what appears to be the plot of a Dukes of Hazard episode, three former Dixie County (North Florida) public officials were convicted August 6, 2009 of conspiracy, soliciting bribes, and lying to FBI agents about money they were given. The FBI had received numerous tips regarding corruption in Dixie county over the past few decades but had not succeeded in busting the criminals, until now. The culpri...

I know, this is not directly related to white collar crime or cyber terrorism, but it is still important. Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice yesterday by a vote of 68-31 by the Senate. According to the SCOTUS Blog, she is the 111th justice, the third female, third minority, and the first Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. And actually, this story is somewhat related to white collar crime, because Sotomayor will be sitting for the reargument of ...

Former Louisiana Democrat representative, William J. Jefferson, was convicted yesterday on bribery, racketeering, money laundering, and other related crimes. (full story from the FBI here) He was found to have taken bribes from individuals and businesses to advance their interests. Some of his schemes were international, with elements in Nigeria, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, Botswana, and the Republic of Congo. He is the same individual who was caught with $90,000 hidden in his freezer. He faces...

Twitter and LiveJournal fell prey to hackers this morning, but appear to be operational as of this post. Twitter claims that they were taken down by a DOS (denial of service) attack. A DOS attack overloads a server with excess traffic to the point that the server loses the ability to process incoming requests. DOS attacks require the concerted action of many individual computers, and often are accomplished by utilizing individual computers, often ones exploited with some sort of trojan horse ...

Three men from Beijing were sentenced over the past few days for attempting to take highly sensitive military technology back to China. The FBI caught the men who were trying to move cutting edge thermal cameras made by FLIR (full story from the FBI here). The three are going to serve between one and five years in federal prison for the attempts. The three were charged under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). Apparently one...

  The Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil fraud and other charges against General Electric today for misleading investors through their preparation of financial statements (See the SEC official release). Apparently GE used deceptive accounting methods to artificially increase its earnings reports. GE has neither admitted nor denied culpability, but have agreed to pay a $50 million dollar penalty to settle the charges. The fairness of this settlement is difficult to grasp consideri...