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Michael Avenatti, the disgraced celebrity lawyer and fierce Donald Trump critic, is scheduled to go on trial Monday in Manhattan for allegedly swindling ex-porn star Stormy Daniels out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Avenatti is accused of fleecing Daniels – his former client – of about $300,000 in money she stood to collect for a 2018 advance on a book about her alleged affair with Trump.

New details emerged yesterday about the finances of the mysterious Democratic fund-raiser Norman Hsu, with the revelation that a private equity fund representing about 100 investors in New York gave him $40 million this year for a loan pool he said would generate a high rate of return. The investors were notified this week that their money might be in jeopardy, in light of disclosures that Mr. Hsu defrauded investors in a Ponzi scheme 16 years ago in California and faced accusations that he engaged in similar conduct more recently, a Manhattan lawyer for the fund said. The lawyer, Seth...

Norman Hsu, the Democratic fund-raiser whose 15-year fugitive odyssey began and ended with skipped court dates and cut a trail of fraud, tainted donations and blindsided candidates, seemed to be at the end of his rope yesterday, hospitalized under guard in Colorado after his latest vanishing act failed. Mr. Hsu, a 56-year-old Hong Kong businessman born Yung Yuen Hsu, who raised large sums for presidential races and many major political figures, who reveled in circles of power and even became a university trustee (with a scholarship in his name) — all while on the run from a three-year prison term...

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign said yesterday that it would give to charity $23,000 it had received from a prominent Democratic donor, and review thousands of dollars more that he had raised, after learning that the authorities in California had a warrant for his arrest stemming from a 1991 fraud case. The donor, Norman Hsu, has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democratic candidates since 2003, and was slated to be co-host next month for a Clinton gala featuring the entertainer Quincy Jones. The event would not have been unusual for Mr. Hsu, a businessman from Hong Kong who...

CHICAGO, Nov. 2 — First came a letter in June, in which federal prosecutors here revealed that they are investigating claims of “endemic hiring fraud” in agencies and departments that fall under the purview of Rod R. Blagojevich, the governor of Illinois. Then, last month, one of Mr. Blagojevich’s top fund-raisers was indicted on accusations that he sought millions in kickbacks from investment companies seeking the state’s pension business. Any of it would be a governor’s bad dream, but particularly so in the case of Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat who faces a re-election vote on Tuesday in a state still...

Eight months after promising action against Medicaid fraud, state lawmakers have deadlocked on two pivotal issues: whether to allow individuals to file whistle-blower lawsuits over abuses, and whether New York's next governor will get to choose the chief Medicaid enforcement official. Experts estimate that abuse of New York's $44 billion Medicaid program, from outright fraud to heedless waste, costs the state billions of dollars a year, and Gov. George E. Pataki and legislative leaders say that combating it is one of their top priorities.. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the Democrats who control the Assembly insist that whistle-blower suits would...

Most people who use e-mail now know enough to be on guard against "phishing" messages that pretend to be from a bank or business but are actually attempts to steal passwords and other personal information. But there is evidence that among global cybercriminals, phishing may already be passé. In some countries, like Brazil, it has been eclipsed by an even more virulent form of electronic con — the use of keylogging programs that silently copy the keystrokes of computer users and send that information to the crooks. These programs are often hidden inside other software and then infect the machine,...

The South Korean scandal that shook the world of science last week is just one sign of a global explosion in research that is outstripping the mechanisms meant to guard against error and fraud. Experts say the problem is only getting worse, as research projects, and the journals that publish the findings, soar. Science is often said to bar dishonesty and bad research with a triple safety net. The first is peer review, in which experts advise governments about what research to finance. The second is the referee system, which has journals ask reviewers to judge if manuscripts merit publication....

New York's Medicaid program pays more than a million claims a day, feeding a $44.5 billion river of checks to radiologists and ambulance drivers, brain surgeons and orderlies, medical centers and corner pharmacies. Many who get those checks pocket more money than they deserve, and millions of taxpayer dollars are believed to be lost every day to theft and waste. Skip to next paragraph Andrea Mohin/The New York Times Falling Behind: Boxes of cases in the attorney general's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, where the size of the staff has failed to keep up with the program's growth. PROGRAM DISORDER High...

TLALCHAPA, Mexico - Gerardo Luviano is looking for somebody to rent his Social Security number. Mr. Luviano, 39, obtained legal residence in the United States almost 20 years ago. But these days, back in Mexico, teaching beekeeping at the local high school in this hot, dusty town in the southwestern part of the country, Mr. Luviano is not using his Social Security number. So he is looking for an illegal immigrant in the United States to use it for him - providing a little cash along the way. "I've almost managed to contact somebody to lend my number to," Mr....

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR I LOVE Canada: It's so clean!" Visiting Americans may be about to lose their favorite cliché about their chilly neighbor. Over the past few weeks, a judicial inquiry in Montreal has heard charges that Canada's governing Liberal Party was running a system of extortion, embezzlement, kickbacks and graft as dirty as anything Americans might expect to find in your run-of-the-mill banana republic. Just last week, for example, Canadians learned that one of the closest friends of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was paid more than $5 million for work that was never done and on the authority of...

The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. "Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked," trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org. "Fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines," declared BlackBoxVoting.org. In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week's presidential election took root and multiplied. But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast...

PAUSING in the foyer of a comfortable suburban home two days before Halloween in 2002, Kevin Barrows, a special agent with the F.B.I., could not bring himself to open the front door. He and a team of agents had just spent several hours searching every room in the house, in New Rochelle, N.Y., but they were leaving empty-handed. Months of investigating had led Mr. Barrows to believe that someone was orchestrating a huge fraud from the house, yet he had not found a single scrap of evidence. Still, something bothered him about the furniture in one of the bedrooms. It...

OP-ED COLUMNIST Whoever, having devised any scheme or artifice to defraud transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. " U.S. Criminal Code, Chapter 63, Section 1343. WASHINGTON — At the root of what is today treated as an embarrassing blunder by duped CBS journalists may turn out to be a felony by its faithless sources. Some person or persons conceived a scheme...

Just over six weeks before the nation holds the first general election in which touch-screen voting will play a major role, specialists agree that whatever the remaining questions about the technology's readiness, it is now too late to make any significant changes. Whether or not the machines are ready for the election - or the electorate ready for the machines - there is no turning back. In what may turn out to be one of the most scrutinized general elections in the country's history, nearly one-third of the more than 150 million registered voters in the United States will be...

WASHINGTON (SH) - No matter who is running the Interior Department - Republicans, Democrats or a hybrid of both - they can't seem to get it right with Native Americans, leaving one to believe that the nation's integrity got buried at Wounded Knee alongside Crazy Horse's heart. Ever since the U.S. 7th Calvary of Custer fame (or infamy, whichever side one is on) massacred a harmless bunch of Ghost Dancers and their women and children at that now-sacred site, officially ending 30 years of armed hostility toward the Indians, the government has maintained a policy of corruption that even the...