Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez pushed back Thursday against claims leveled a day earlier by Vice President JD Vance that the state isn’t serious about combating Medicaid fraud.
“Hawaii has not ignored Medicaid fraud,” Lopez said in a statement, suggesting that Vance presented an unfair assessment of results achieved recently by the state’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit under the state Department of the Attorney General. The unit is largely funded by the federal
government.
Vance, who chairs an anti-fraud task force that President Donald Trump formed in March, said Wednesday during a White House news conference that Hawaii’s MFCU produced no Medicaid fraud indictments or convictions over the past few years because program administrators don’t take it seriously.
“They don’t think that fraud is a big enough problem,” he said. “They don’t care about protecting resources, and they don’t…
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