A veteran USAID contracting officer and three corporate chiefs have confessed to a decade-long bribery and securities-fraud scheme worth more than $550 million. The guilty pleas land days after Elon Musk’s blistering claim that the aid agency is “a criminal organization” run by radical-left operatives. Are the dots finally connecting?

Malta’s pursuit of becoming a crypto hub under the EU’s Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation (MiCA) is under intense scrutiny. While MiCA promises standardized oversight, Malta’s history of lax enforcement and ties to high-profile financial crimes raise alarming questions about its commitment to genuine compliance. The case of StablR, a Malta-licensed stablecoin issuer, epitomizes these concerns, exposing systemic flaws in the nation’s regulatory framework.

Jonas Koeller and Stephan Christoph Schaefer, founders of the S&K Group, are at the center of one of Germany’s largest real estate fraud cases. Between 2008 and 2013, they collected over €240 million from around 11,000 investors. Their business model: purchasing properties from foreclosures, artificially inflating their value, and reselling them multiple times through a network of funds.

The U.S. Justice Department has quietly closed about half of its open Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) probes and released new guidelines that tie future anti-bribery prosecutions to clear U.S. national-security or competitiveness harms. The move, coupled with fresh whistle-blower incentives and a sharper focus on individual culpability, redraws the risk landscape for multinationals—especially in cyber-finance hubs.

A jaw‐dropping exposé from the New York Times has thrust the Jeffrey Epstein scandal back into America's gaze. We now learn Epstein—convicted sex trafficker who allegedly took his own life in 2019—secretly injected $40 million into Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures during 2015–16. That investment has ballooned to a staggering $170 million, becoming the estate’s largest remaining asset.

tablR (website), a Malta-based stablecoin issuer regulated under the EU’s MiCA, positions itself as a transparent and compliant player in the digital assets space. However, scrutiny of its leadership and disclosure practices reveals significant concerns about governance, regulatory adherence, and ethical transparency. Founded by Gijs op de Weegh, former COO of the scandal-ridden payment processor Payvision, StablR’s white paper omits critical details about its CEO’s involvement in one of Europe’s largest cybercrime facilitation cases.

The entire FinCrime Observer website was taken offline—not because of a server failure, not because of a DDoS attack, but because of one fake DMCA complaint targeting a single article. The result? Massive operational damage, loss of reach, interruption of an ongoing migration, and a blunt realization: 10Web is not fit to host any serious, critical, or investigative website.