Jim’s still on his Spring Break, but offers this reprise of a recent column …
“This is the number one form of tax evasion in Connecticut. Connecticut is losing millions annually and our DMV does not care.”
So says Stonington Tax Assessor Jennifer Lineaweaver, president of the state association for her profession, the Connecticut Association of Assessing Officers. She’s speaking of Connecticut residents who register their cars in other states to avoid local property taxes. “Connecticut is also losing money on registrations, emissions, insurance and unpaid parking tickets that cannot be enforced,” she says.
get Maine plates for your vehicles… without even traveling to the state or having an address there. You can even register in Montana, a scheme especially popular with expensive motor home owners.
A couple of years ago Vermont admitted there were 3,600 cars registered in that…
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