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A California man pleaded guilty to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business that funneled more than $5 million across international borders, spotlighting the critical role shadow networks play in the global cybercrime ecosystem. 

By acting as an illicit intermediary between fraud victims and the ultimate beneficiaries, operations like his deliberately obscure the financial paper trail, making illicit transactions significantly harder for law enforcement to detect while laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen funds.

The man, Ifeanyi Emmanuel Ugwu, 49, of Bakersfield, admitted in federal court to deliberately bypassing the licensing requirements mandated by United States law to track financial flows and combat money laundering.

From December 2020 to August 2023, Ugwu operated the illicit network through his company, Franklin Finance Inc., according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California. Court records detail an elaborate effort to evade detection, claiming Ugwu opened and controlled 20 accounts across nine banks and financial institutions, relying on false statements to deceive bank officials and customers alike about the true nature of his enterprise to keep the operation running.

Over the nearly three-year period, Ugwu received funds from more than 100 people across the United States, systematically transferring the money to recipients in countries including China and Nigeria. Prosecutors stated that approximately $580,000 of the total sum was traced directly to victims of various fraud and cybercrime schemes, though authorities did not elaborate on the specific nature of the underlying scams.

Ugwu is scheduled to be sentenced in July and faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. 

A Romanian court has lifted all preventive judicial control measures, including mandatory police check-ins, against internet personality Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan, according to The Telegraph. The final, unappealable ruling removes the remaining pre-trial restrictions stemming from the dual U.S.-British citizens’ December 2022 arrest on human trafficking and rape charges, which defense lawyer Eugene Vidineac said confirms the case was built on “questionable evidence.”

The brothers, who deny all wrongdoing, still face a second Romanian criminal investigation involving allegations of trafficking minors and money laundering, as well as pending extradition to Britain. In an exclusive statement to the British newspaper, Tristan Tate accused Romanian authorities of corruption and said he and his brother are currently in Uzbekistan, adding that he had faced various forms of detention for more than three years while prosecutors “were left holding absolutely nothing.”

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

About a decade ago, India’s government began subsidizing the purchase of liquid petroleum gas, or LPG, to promote greater adoption among its lower-income citizens. Switching to the gas was considered a safer and more reliable alternative to burning wood and coal for cooking at home, which families in resource-strapped rural areas were still doing en masse. Ever since, the fuel has become ubiquitous. The bulk of Indian households prepare most of their food with it, and typically use a few cylinders of LPG every year, an amount that varies depending on whether they are in rural or urban communities. 

In all that time, Subhash Kapoor hadn’t had much trouble securing cooking gas. Kapoor, who works as a driver in Noida, on the outskirts of New Delhi, lives with his wife and three children. A single gas cylinder would cost about Rs. 900 (about $10) and last about 40 days for the family. The process to secure one had become painless and routine: Every couple of months or so, he would place a call to a nearby gas agency, and the cylinders would be delivered to his home. In January, Kapoor did just that and received two cylinders, the maximum a household is allowed to keep at any given time.

“I had no issues getting a cylinder in January,” said Kapoor, speaking in Hindi. “I thought the cylinders were easily available. Whenever I called, they would send them home.”

That changed in early March. As the U.S.-Israel war with Iran took off, the Middle Eastern country shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a key channel for the flow of oil and, in particular, liquified petroleum gas, which more than 2 billion people across Asia and Africa rely on for cooking. 

With the flow of trade through the Strait halted due to the conflict, a cooking gas shortage has swept across the country. India is particularly vulnerable because it is the world’s second largest importer of LPG. Last year, imports accounted for roughly 60 percent of India’s supply, 90 percent of which came from the Middle East. 

Panic set in among those dependent on LPG for cooking. Out of the blue, Kapoor received a text message saying that he’d picked up his allotment of cylinders for March — even though he hadn’t. When he called the agency, he says he was told he wouldn’t be able to get another cylinder until the end of the month. Kapoor suspects that the agency sold his allotment off in the black market, where prices were surging.

People began hoarding gas cylinders, and in the Delhi area, prices skyrocketed by 600 percent. Some people stood in line for three or four days to get LPG cylinders. 

With his own supply running low, Kapoor had little choice but to turn to the black market. About three weeks ago, he purchased a cylinder for Rs. 3,600 (about $39), more than three times what he usually pays. Kapoor’s been able to schedule another delivery from the gas agency for April, and he’s hoping he won’t have to rely on the black market again.

The shortage has forced restaurants across the country to close, while others have stripped staple meals like butter chicken and dosa that require more gas to prepare from menus. Everywhere from hospital kitchens to corporate businesses and school cafeterias have reported shortfalls. In Mumbai, street food vendors who serve chaat, vada pav, and other snacks that school children and day laborers rely on, are closing up shop, drastically altering their menus, or securing cylinders from the black market but hiding them in gunny sacks for fear of discovery. University students living on campus have also seen their dining options scaled back, with some colleges allowing students to cook in their dorm common areas.  

For those who can afford it, induction stoves have become a popular option. The electric, plug-in stovetops sell for the equivalent of $20 to $30, and they’ve been flying off shelves. The demand for these stoves is so high that some manufacturers are running out of stock. But the stoves are only a possibility for those who can afford the upfront cost and live in homes with reliable electricity. Lower-income rural communities are much more likely to revert to burning wood and coal, said Dawit Guta, an economist at the University of Northern British Columbia who has studied the clean energy transition in India. 

“Rural areas, they don’t have any other option,” he said. “This is the biggest challenge the sector is facing.” 

When cooking gas becomes scarce or unaffordable, households begin making impossible choices, according to Chelsea Marcho, a senior director for research and policy at the Food Security Leadership Council and former USAID official under Biden. Many households throughout India are reverting to burning firewood, charcoal, even food scraps — a regression that carries its own serious health costs. The indoor air pollution generated by these practices puts families, particularly women and children who are most often home during food preparation, at heightened risk of heart disease, respiratory illness, and other harmful health conditions.

Some families may even skip meals, according to Marcho. And people’s diets are likely to shift away from nutritious staples that require longer cooking times toward faster-cooking foods or nonperishables that need no preparation at all. The tradeoffs, she said, are as much nutritional as they are economic.

The crisis has not yet tipped into a full-blown humanitarian emergency, but it is already disrupting everyday life and food access in tangible ways. Manufacturers that rely on LPG are also feeling the squeeze, meaning the damage extends well beyond restaurants and home kitchens. “We sometimes forget that food systems, and energy systems are deeply interconnected. So a disruption in one of these can quickly affect other parts of the system. We’re seeing this unfold in real-time right now,” said Marcho. “Cooking gas feels like a small piece of this puzzle,” she added, “but when you’re thinking about food systems broadly, and how everything’s connected, it can make a big impact on global food security.” 

Meanwhile, the global food system is straining on all fronts. Fertilizer costs are spiking in tandem with fuel prices, making agricultural inputs more expensive. Packaging and shipping costs are rising, too. Every pressure point along the food supply chain, Marcho said, is getting more expensive — and all at once.

Economists predict that other nations with thinner margins that rely on LPG imports through the Persian Gulf could see similar cooking gas shortage patterns in the near future — among those in Asia are Thailand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Countries with relatively strong economic growth and ongoing industrialization, such as Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, are also likely to face significant access challenges. These countries don’t depend on the Middle East for fuel to prepare food, but they do depend on the region for a stable energy supply, which, when disrupted, can show up in escalating grocery costs.

But that’s just the near-term picture. If the Strait’s closure persists well into the rest of the year, Chris Barrett, an agricultural and development economist at Cornell, warns we could see it exacerbate the food accessibility crisis across multiple African nations, too. Those that are heavily reliant on LPG and food imports and already among the most food-insecure — such as Senegal, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Côte d’Ivoire, Zambia, and Mozambique — are highly vulnerable. Others, such as Nigeria, Ghana, and Tanzania, have been shifting to domestic production of LPG, which offers some buffer, but because of fertilizer shortfalls and rising food prices, no part of the continent is insulated. Global food commodity prices rose in March for the second month in a row, due largely to energy inflation from the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, or FAO. If the conflict stretches beyond 40 days and high input costs persist, pronounced effects on global food supply and commodity costs are expected through the rest of the year and all of 2027. 

Further down the line, Barrett argues that the war’s fallout could very well prop up the clean energy transition in some of the regions facing the more pronounced consequences. Some world leaders are already calling for a rapid transition amid skyrocketing oil prices as they enact emergency measures to protect supplies and slow inflation. South Korea’s president Lee Jae Myung even recently urged the country to rapidly shift to renewable energy while confessing the situation is “so severe even I can’t sleep at night.”  

“I suspect that this is most likely to generate a bit of a slowdown in, for example, installation of new solar capacity across big parts of the low and middle income world,” said Barrett. “But once you get beyond the present pressing financial constraints, the incentives to move more rapidly to solar, in particular, or to a lesser degree, geothermal or wind, are massive. I mean, this is really illustrating the hazards of being dependent upon hydrocarbon shipped from halfway around the world, where the supply chain is very easily disrupted.” 

Others, like Seungki Lee, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University, aren’t so sure. Because of the economic strain created by the conflict, nation-level progress toward the U.N.’s sustainable development targets, for example, are more likely to see at least a short-term regression on the aim to transition billions of households away from using coal, kerosene, or solid biomass as primary cooking fuels, according to Lee.

For now, Lee warns that if disruptions to the Persian Gulf’s flow of trade continue, no region will go unscathed. 

In a televised address to the American people on Wednesday night, President Donald Trump stated that talks with Iran are ongoing, but did not clarify when he expects the war to end. “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks,” said Trump. “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.” Over the weekend, the president vowed to target Iran’s power plants and bridges, warning that the country would be “living in Hell” if the Strait isn’t reopened by Tuesday. Iran, for its part, has refuted the president’s claim of direct discussions.

Even nations in the Western Hemisphere, including the U.S., “are not immune” to the downstream effects on the global food system, Lee said. “Eventually, it’s a matter of time. Everybody will be directly, or indirectly, affected by this.” 

The post The Iran War Is Changing How People Cook — and What They Eat appeared first on Truthdig.

No one ever accused the Democrats of being competent at politics, but with Trump leading the opposition, it shouldn’t take much competence to win. Ordinarily, politicians look to twist their opponents’ words to put them in a more negative light. But Trump has done that job for them.

Last week, Trump said:

“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

This is both an absurd statement — we have been paying for Medicare and Medicaid for six decades — and runs directly counter to Trump’s most fundamental campaign promise of putting America first. Trump insisted he would not get involved in foreign wars, especially in the Middle East, and defend these programs that more than 100 million people depend on. 

Now, Trump has flipped 180 degrees on putting America first. He says he only wants to pay for his wars and forget about people’s health care. 

And just to drive home the point, there was a reason Trump made this promise. Medicare and Medicaid are hugely popular; wars in the Middle East, and especially wars of choice, are not. Trump’s comments should be the reddest of red meat for Democrats looking to challenge Republican candidates this fall.

Trump’s Military Buildup is Real Money

It is also important to realize that Trump is proposing to use huge sums for his military. The media have made a practice of having deliberately uninformative budget reporting. They routinely report huge numbers in the millions, billions, and trillions, without any context, knowing that almost none of their readers have any comprehension of their meaning. 

But Trump’s budget request is real money, by any standard. The military budget for 2025 was $862 billion. Adjusting that up by 6 percent for inflation would put it at $914 billion in 2027. Instead, Trump is asking for $1,500 billion, a difference of $584 billion, an increase of 64 percent. 

And to be clear, this is for a single year. If this is summed over a decade, as is common in budget debates, it would be $5.8 trillion, far more than the huge tax bill Trump pushed through last summer (the “One Big Beautiful Bill). It swamps everything else that becomes a huge debate topic in Washington.

Yes, I did use this graph a couple of weeks ago, but that was when the issue was just the $200 billion that Trump was going to ask for his war in Iran. Now we’re looking at an even bigger military request. And I didn’t forget to include the bars for the Minnesota fraud that Trump constantly hypes, or the nixed funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They are too small to see next to Trump’s military spending request. 

And just to be 100 percent clear, this demand for more military spending is entirely coming out of Donald Trump’s dementia. This is like when he said that he had to deploy National Guard troops to Washington, DC, because people were scared to go out to restaurants. I lived in DC for more than a quarter century and still know plenty of people there. This was lunacy. There are some high-crime areas (mostly poor and Black), but most of the city is very safe, and the restaurant industry was thriving.

Similarly, Trump was insisting that he needed to deploy National Guard troops to Portland last summer and fall because the city was burning down. He said the stores had all closed down or were boarded up because people kept breaking the windows. This would be news to anyone in Portland, which is a beautiful, peaceful city with plenty of stores with big windows.

Trump’s big military request is more of this nonsense, but with a hugely larger price tag. Who are the enemies that we need to spend so much money to protect against, Russia, with an economy less than one quarter the size of ours? 

China does have an economy that is one-third larger than ours, but until recently it was our largest trading partner, not an enemy. It is more than a bit crazy that Donald Trump is looking to make enemies around the world so that he can demand absurd amounts of military spending and then tell us we can’t afford to pay for healthcare and childcare. 

This is not a tough question. Congress needs to tell Trump that he can’t have another $580 billion for unnecessary wars and an endless supply of big weapons for him and Pete Hegseth to play with. The vast majority of people would rather see their tax dollars go to something useful.

The post Trump’s Pledge: Cut Medicare and Medicaid To Pay for War appeared first on Truthdig.

Online scam operations uncovered in a remote exclave, a national ID program reportedly infiltrated by cybercriminals, tales of bags of cash arriving on private planes. The tiny Southeast Asian country of Timor-Leste is battling the scourge of transnational fraud syndicates. And according to some in its government, it is at risk of an existential defeat. 

In an extraordinary “manifesto” posted on social media in September, the minister with oversight over the country’s intelligence agency, Agio Pereira, warned that foreign criminals have corrupted the country’s legal system, co-opted regulatory bodies, and bought its politicians.

“These foreign criminals came not as conquerors with armies, but as corruptors with suitcases full of dirty money,” wrote Pereira. “Will we be a sovereign nation governed by democratic laws and institutions, or will we become a criminal state possessed by foreign mafia syndicates?”

Southeast Asia has been hit by a cyber-fraud crime wave of epic proportions over the past decade. In countries like Cambodia, Myanmar, and the Philippines, industrial-scale scam operations have targeted victims around the world, stealing as much as $64 billion annually, according to a United Nations report this year.

A former Portuguese colony with a population of 1.4 million located on the far eastern fringe of Southeast Asia, Timor-Leste was largely overlooked by the powerful cyber-fraud gangs, until now.

“What is currently being observed in Timor-Leste shares stark similarities to what was seen in the early stages of the current scam centre crisis in Mekong countries and the Philippines,” the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in a threat alert released in September.  

The fears of a looming crisis provide the backdrop to an investigation by OCCRP and Guardian Australia that found three people sanctioned by the U.S. government last October for alleged ties to the Cambodia-based Prince Group — the world’s largest alleged cyber-fraud syndicate — had been involved in a proposed luxury cryptocurrency resort project in Timor-Leste. 

The Prince Group says it “categorically rejects that it or its founder, Chen Zhi, has engaged in any unlawful activity.” The sanctioned individuals involved in the Timor-Leste resort project were dismissed or withdrew their investments after the U.S. sanctions were announced.

Experts say Timor-Leste has traits that make it attractive to transnational crime syndicates, and a magnet for money-launderers.

The country is one of the most oil-dependent in the world, its productive petroleum reserves are dwindling, and it desperately needs foreign investment as it seeks to diversify its economy. It has porous borders and poorly equipped police. It also has a cash-based economy and, much like prominent online scam hub Cambodia, Timor-Leste uses the U.S. dollar. This makes it easier for criminals based in the country to shift funds internationally, Timor-Leste’s central bank governor, Helder Lopes, told OCCRP. 

“It’s very easy for the cross-border transaction,” he explained in an interview. “If their money is dirty somewhere else and they would like to clean it, they come to here. If they happen to go into our system and clean it, then it can go anywhere.”

Damien Kingsbury, an Australian academic and longtime analyst of Timor-Leste, said poverty and a lack of job opportunities for its predominantly young population was another factor that made the country vulnerable. Its many youth gangs could potentially be co-opted by organized crime groups, Kingsbury said.

The youth gangs “have made inroads into the police force and military, which makes detecting and prosecuting their criminal behavior more difficult,” he added. Kingsbury said that corruption in Timor-Leste is already commonplace. 

“It is not so bad as to undermine the whole fabric of political society but is bad enough to ensure that government projects in particular lack oversight, suffer from heavily padded contracts and have embedded a culture of nepotism and political favor,” he said.   

Scam Centers and Gambling Shops

The first clear sign that something was going wrong in Timor-Leste came during a raid last August in Oecusse, a small exclave nestled on three sides by Indonesian territory.

When police entered the exclave’s Oe-Upu Hotel, they uncovered a scene that was reminiscent of established scam centers elsewhere in Southeast Asia: rows of desks covered in computer monitors and discarded water bottles, staffed by a startled workforce that, according to local media, comprised mostly women from Indonesia, China, Malaysia, and Singapore. SIM cards and Starlink satellite devices were seized, and six low-level staff arrested.

One mid-level staff member of the scam operation, who spoke to OCCRP on the basis of anonymity for fear of retribution, said he recruited local scammers to target mostly female Brazilians and Indonesians. The scammers purported to sell goods online such as beauty products, but kept the money without ever sending customers the purchases. 

The employee was not arrested and the fate of all those arrested in the raids is unknown. A police spokesperson did not respond when telephoned for comment.

The employee said his bosses — many of them ethnic Chinese from Malaysia — asked if he wanted to work in scam centers in Cambodia, offering $1,000 a month, about four times average monthly earnings in Timor-Leste. It was an offer he rejected, but he said he helped some of his colleagues after they were arrested in the raids in Oecusse. 

“They were found guilty but then they have to pay money and they can go home straight away,” he said, adding each paid $10,000 to the court.

In the wake of the raids, Timor-Leste’s government has launched a plan to combat organized crime by tackling online gambling, and gathered support from international anti-crime agencies. 

In a separate case in Oecusse last year, a company chaired by a convicted cybercriminal was hired by officials to manage the regional government’s contract for a national ID project, according to the 2025 UNODC threat alert. The company’s chairman had earlier been convicted in Singapore for conspiring to acquire stolen personal data, reportedly for use in online scams and gambling operations, the UNODC said. 

After the scam center and ID project controversy were exposed, the head of Oecusse’s special administrative region, Rogerio Lobato, was replaced with no explanation in October. 

That same month, the government revoked the first online gambling license it had issued only six months earlier, citing “risks to the country’s security, social stability, economic integrity, and international reputation.” Although the government has not given further detail about the reasons for that decision, online gambling has long been linked to organized crime, scams, and money laundering across Southeast Asia.

The country’s prime minister, meanwhile, personally supervised the shutdown of a lottery office known as the Grand Dragon in the capital’s main mall. The lottery operation reportedly shares ownership with the company that lost its online gambling license, Grand River Universe (GRU). In a statement on its website, GRU said it “respected the sovereign decision of Timor-Leste” to cancel its online gambling license, noting it had “not conducted any active business in the gaming sector in Timor-Leste.” 

Spotlight on Passports 

In the cases of alleged organized crime uncovered in Timor-Leste last year, those implicated carried multiple passports and entered the country “using documents issued by states other than their actual nationality,” according to the UNODC. 

Multiple passports help criminals by making it difficult for authorities to track them as they cross borders, open bank accounts, and establish companies and businesses, the U.N. agency said.

“Such tactics undermine global efforts to combat transnational organized crime, particularly when criminals use FDI [foreign direct investment] to legitimize their presence and launder illicit funds,” it said.

Disquiet about Timor-Leste’s passport administration extends to the issuing of diplomatic passports to foreigners.  

In a September letter to Timor-Leste’s prime minister, local civil society groups called for the review and cancellation of diplomatic passports issued to non-citizens.

The letter’s signatories said they had “serious concerns regarding Timor-Leste’s sovereignty, constitutional order, and adherence to the rule of law — foundational principles shaped by the sacrifices of its people.”

Only an accredited diplomat who holds a diplomatic passport gets immunity from prosecution in the country in which they are posted, but the document can smooth travel across borders for other holders, said Don Rothwell, an expert in international law at the Australian National University.

“In many instances, it will be effectively visa-free travel,” he said. “They will probably be exempt from luggage checks.”

Timor-Leste’s president Jose Ramos-Horta — who can request the prestigious travel documents be issued and appoint foreigners as special advisers — defended the practice, noting he could cancel a passport at any time. Holders could be checked at customs, he added. Moreover, he said, recipients could attract investment to the country and spur development.

“We don’t pay them anything,” he told reporters in an interview. “So the least we can do is [offer] some status, which they like.”

The president, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Timor-Leste independence hero, said the country was vulnerable to “sophisticated” offshore crime gangs and must be “unforgiving and ruthless” in combating them. 

Even so, he dismissed  senior minister Pereira’s depiction of widespread corruption and a nation-state at risk of being captured by organized crime. “Nonsense. Exaggerated,” he said.

“There is corruption,” he added. ”Mostly petty corruption at the mid-level.”

Ethiopian authorities have arrested the suspected mastermind behind a sprawling human trafficking network accused of smuggling thousands of migrants and subjecting them to severe violence and extortion en route to Europe. The network is accused of killing more than 100 people and sexually assaulting at least 50 women.

The ringleader, identified by the Ethiopian Federal Police as Yitbarek Dawit, was apprehended alongside nine accomplices. Investigators say the criminal syndicate has been operating since 2018 and is responsible for smuggling more than 3,000 young people from across East Africa, explicitly targeting victims in Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya, and Somalia.

Migrants were systematically transported to detention centers in Libya—a notorious and perilous transit hub for those attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Once there, they were held captive and tortured to extract ransom payments from their desperate families. Authorities noted that these grim details have been corroborated by testimonies from over 100 survivors and their relatives.

The arrests are part of a sweeping, nationwide crackdown on human smuggling operations. Ethiopian authorities have so far identified more than 70 suspected traffickers and successfully tracked down 10 individuals, including Dawit.

The suspected traffickers have been formally transferred to the Ethiopian Justice Ministry to face prosecution, according to the state-run Ethiopian News Agency.