Hasta La Gadget!

Apparently the House Republican leader forgot the country was being ravaged in 2020 by COVID-19 before vaccines were available.

Medical and psychiatric records of parents of children killed in the 2012 school massacre were among a document dump that included Jones’ leaked texts.

The QB has been accused by two dozen women of sexual misconduct during massage therapy sessions.

An alleged developer of the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixing service has been arrested in the Netherlands. The Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD), a government agency that investigates financial crimes, said the 29-year-old man is suspected of “involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies.” The suspect was due to appear before a judge today.

The FIOD started investigating Tornado Cash in June and its Financial Advanced Cyber Team suspects that the platform has been used to conceal the flow of criminal funds on a large scale, including illicit gains from crypto hacks and scams. The agency found that, since the platform launched in 2019, at least $1 billion of crypto of “criminal origin” has been funneled through Tornado Cash, with the service’s creator believed to “have made large-scale profits from these transactions.”

Earlier this week, the US government sanctioned Tornado Cash, a move that prohibits anyone in the country from carrying out any transactions on the service. The Treasury Department claimed that over $7 billion worth of crypto has been laundered through Tornado Cash, including $455 million stolen by North Korea’s state-backed Lazarus Group hacking collective.

Qualcomm was apparently the victim of a sophisticated fraud. The Los Angeles Timesreports the federal government revealed charges against former Qualcomm research VP Karim Arabi and three others for allegedly tricking the chip maker into spending $150 million in 2015 to acquire technology that it already had. After Arabi developed a quicker method of testing processors, the four launched a scheme to falsely claim that a Canadian graduate student (Arabi’s sister) had invented the technique and was commercializing it through a startup. Arabi purportedly hid his involvement through the entire process (his sister even changed her name), leading Qualcomm to buy the startup even though it legally owned the executive’s inventions.

Arabi left Qualcomm in June 2016. Prosecutors further alleged that the quartet laundered money through methods that included interest-free loans and purchasing foreign real estate. The penalties could be steep if the court convicts Arabi’s group. Each could face up to 20 years in prison and fines of either $250,000 or double whatever they gained through the fraud scheme. 

Qualcomm sued Arabi, his sister and the startup’s CEO in 2017. That case was dismissed without prejudice in 2018, opening the door to another lawsuit, but the company didn’t discuss the possibility of another suit in a statement to The Times.