Two brothers from Romania led an organized fraud ring that used SNAP benefits to buy thousands of dollars of food at warehouse clubs in North Carolina and resell it, authorities say.
The pair were arrested Aug. 1 at a Charlotte storage unit after they bought $15,000 of food at a Sam’s Club in Matthews, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation said.
Marian Ovidiu Dumitru, 37, and Catalin Dumitru, 39, pleaded guilty to wire fraud July 2 in federal court in Charlotte, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of North Carolina said.
The brothers, who entered the country illegally, were part of a ring that stole over $760,000 from the federal food program in New Jersey, Massachusetts and other states, the attorney’s office said.
The group used skimmers to steal data from electronic benefits cards used by SNAP recipients and put the information on counterfeit cards. They used the…
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