Crime

After all the times people have been duped by Ponzi schemes and Nigerian scams, people still fall for similar cons. But in the case of the .44 Magnum Leveraged Financing Program, some investors recently found a way to lose their money with a real bang.

A senior trader at the Swiss bank UBS was a "master fraudster" who lost his bank $2.3 billion, imperiling its very existence, through risky deals and deceit in a bid to improve his status, bonus and job prospects, prosecutors said Friday.

A top executive in the now-defunct empire of disgraced Texas financier R. Allen Stanford was sentenced to three years in prison Thursday for her role in helping the once jet-setting businessman bilk investors out of more than $7 billion in one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history.

Cambodian police have arrested a co-founder of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay and are preparing his extradition to Sweden, where he was convicted of violating copyright laws.

Older Americans are under more financial pressure than ever. Unfortunately, scam artists are taking advantage of the sometimes desperate needs of seniors to boost their income, and victims have lost huge portions of their life savings as a result.

The U.S. is locking up more illegal immigrants than ever, generating lucrative profits for the nation's largest prison companies, and an AP review shows the businesses have spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying lawmakers and contributing to campaigns.

Counterfeiting is a detail-oriented art, but one Arizona man who attempted it wasn't quite scrupulous enough about his fake bills: He attempted to pass a forged $100 bill with a picture-perfect image of Benjamin Franklin -- but a watermark of Abraham Lincoln.