Whistleblower Group

March 9, 2016

New Jersey announced that the owner of a now-defunct Bergen County used car dealership, D.I.B Leasing, along with three employees and a bookkeeper, have been charged with conspiracy, money laundering, and other offenses in connection with bank financing scam that allegedly netted $1.4 million in fraudulent loans for luxury cars. Prosecutors allege the defendants created fake employment records, inflated incomes, and supplied false pay stubs and fictitious employee verifications to dupe banks into approving auto financing for customers whose income levels did not qualify them for loans on the pricey vehicles. NJ

March 9, 2016

A Las Vegas court ordered Banc de Binary Ltd., ET Binary Options Ltd., BO Systems Ltd., BDB Services Ltd., and Oren Shabat Laurent to pay over $9 million in penalties and restitution for violating the CFTC's prohibition against trading binary options off-exchange.  CFTC

March 8, 2016

The Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel profile whistleblower Brain Emery, represented by Constantine Cannon attorneys Tim McCormack and Molly Knobler.  Click here to read the article.

March 9, 2016

The CFTC ordered CHS, Inc. and CHS Hedging, LLC  to pay $1 million for inaccurately reporting positions in corn and soybeans.  CFTC

March 9, 2016

The Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service announced the guilty pleas of Cayman National Securities Ltd. (CNS) and Cayman National Trust Co. Ltd. (CNT), two Cayman Island affiliates of Cayman National Corporation. CNS and CNT pleaded guilty to a criminal Information charging them with conspiring with many of their U.S. taxpayer-clients to hide more than $130 million in offshore accounts from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and to evade U.S. taxes on the income earned in those accounts. CNS and CNT entered their guilty pleas pursuant to plea agreements requiring the companies to, among other things, produce through the treaty process account files of non-compliant U.S. taxpayers who maintained accounts at CNS and CNT, and pay a total of $6 million in financial penalties. DOJ

March 8, 2016

The CFPB’s supervisory examinations of banks and nonbanks in the last months of 2015  resulted in the remediation of $14.3 million to approximately 228,000 consumers.  Under the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB supervises banks and credit unions with more than $10 billion in assets and certain nonbanks, including, among others, mortgage companies, private student loan lenders, and payday lenders.  In their exams, the Bureau found violations in the student loan market, including illegal automatic defaults by student loan servicers and illegal garnishment threats by debt collectors performing services for the DOE. Examiners also found instances of international money transfer companies violating the CFPB’s new remittance rule, banks providing inaccurate information to credit reporting companies about customer checking accounts, and debt collectors illegally contacting consumers. CFPB

March 8, 2016

A Connecticut psychiatrist will pay $404,798 to settle a civil False Claims Act lawsuit alleging that she submitted false claims for payments to Connecticut’s Medicaid program. The state alleged that, from March 2010 to September 2013, while operating a private practice in Mansfield, Dr. Panoor submitted upcoded claims indicating that she provided Medicaid patients with both group counseling and either individual psychotherapy or a detailed examination on the same dates of service when, in fact, she did not provide psychotherapy or detailed examination sessions but instead provided medication management services or a brief meeting with the patient for the purpose of monitoring or changing a patient’s drug prescription – services that are coded, and thus reimbursed, at lower payment rates.