The Hamtramck city clerk who reported election fraud in the 2023 City Council election and in whose office unopen ballots for last year’s close mayoral election were found has been fired, city officials confirmed.
Former City Clerk Rana Faraj had been on paid administrative since Nov. 10, according to a lawsuit she filed against the city in early December. Mayor Adam Alharbi said Faraj’s employment had been “on hold for legal reasons because of her lawsuit,” and that insurance attorneys recently told city officials they could proceed with dismissing her.
The move comes about four months after Faraj was placed on leave when uncounted ballots that could have swayed the 2025 mayoral election were found in her office. Faraj and city officials have not explained how uncounted ballots wound up in the Clerk’s Office.
She was fired “due to misconduct, bad behavior, election interference, and…
THE HASHFLARE “CLOUD MINING” PONZI SCHEME (GLOBAL/ESTONIA)
Date: February 13, 2025 (Guilty Pleas) Perpetrators: Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turogin
Case Description: This $577 million cryptocurrency fraud remains one of the largest digital asset scams in history, with major legal developments concluding in 2025. Potapenko and Turogin operated “Hashflare,” which they marketed as a massive cryptocurrency mining operation. Hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide purchased “mining contracts,” believing they were renting hash power to mine Bitcoin. In reality, the duo was running a sophisticated Ponzi scheme.
They created fake customer dashboards that showed “real-time” mining profits, but the money being paid out was simply the capital of newer investors. They laundered the proceeds through shell companies to purchase luxury real estate and a fleet of high-end vehicles. After a massive international investigation involving the FBI and Estonian authorities, the pair agreed to forfeit over $400 million in assets. This case underscores the “Cyber-enabled Fraud” warning issued by the FATF in early 2026: as technology evolves, the scale of fraud moves from local millions to global billions in the blink of an eye.
Link to Original: ACFE – High Profile Fraud of 2025