A badminton coach has been arrested, facing charges of sexual exploitation and sexual assault. The suspect, from Markham in Canada, was taken into police custody on 12 May 2021 following an investigation, which was launched after a young person was allegedly sexually abused in early May. While no additional victims have been identified at present, authorities are encouraging anyone with further information to come forward.
Anti-human trafficking official says Windsor sees up to 200 cases a year. New tool could help victims
CBC
23-05-18 13:10
Police in Windsor, Ontario have launched a social media-based initiative to help victims of human trafficking connect with support. Informative videos hosted on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter form part of the Windsor Police Service Community Accessible Resource Education Support initiative, or WPS CARES. The video-based approach is aimed at reaching vulnerable people, including those experiencing intimate partner violence, child abuse, human trafficking, and sexual assault. QR codes and promoted content are also being used by the police to spread the word.
Deutsche Bank will pay $75m to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the bank helped enable the sex trafficking of young women by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to lawyers representing the victims. If approved by a federal judge, the settlement will resolve the lawsuit filed in New York last year. Deutsche Bank denied comment on the proposed settlement but said that it had taken strides to amend past issues while investing in bolstering its internal controls. This is not the first time Deutsche Bank has been involved in legal action relating to Epstein. In 2020, the bank agreed to pay $150m to New York regulators after it was claimed it repeatedly overlooked suspicious transactions involving Epstein.
Tejay Fletcher, the founder and leading administrator of the now-defunct iSpoof.cc website, which provided scammers with tools to disguise phone calls from banks to empty their targets’ accounts, blew his ill-gotten gains on luxury cars, including a £230,000 Lamborghini, London’s Southwark Crown Court heard during his sentencing hearing. Fletcher, who earned around £2m from iSpoof, is one of the individuals arrested last year in the UK’s biggest fraud sting by the Metropolitan Police, which reported that iSpoof had directly defrauded a minimum of £43m from UK victims and at least £100m from victims globally.
Alaska court reconsiders 135-year sentence given to youngest girl ever convicted of murder in Alaska
The Toronto Star
23-05-18 22:07
A court in Alaska will reconsider a 135-year sentence imposed on a 14-year-old girl for taking part in the shooting of three elderly people approximately 40 years ago. The state’s Court of Appeals has sent the case back to a lower court for review after Judge Michael Spaan gave a sentence without proper consideration of the girl’s prospects for rehabilitation. The issue is relevant due to changing constitutional court precedents showing that juveniles are reckless, impulsive, and more prone to risk-taking than adults. This means that sentencing rules have also changed, stating that young offenders must not be sentenced to the functional equivalent of life without parole.
Tejay Fletcher has pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court to charges including making or supplying an article for use in fraud, encouraging or assisting the commission of an offence, possession of criminal property, and transferring criminal property, carried out through his iSpoof website. The site, which earned more than £3.2m ($4.3m) in Bitcoins over less than three years, provided a software tool that enabled criminals to trick people into believing they were speaking to their bank on the telephone by showing false phone numbers. The fraudulent scheme led to the losses of £100m globally, including £43m in the UK. Fletcher will be sentenced on 29 October.
The south Turkish province of Adiyaman, which has been hit hard in various earthquakes, has long been a stronghold of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His success at winning 66% of the vote there in the last round of elections may mean that he remains confident he can win Turkey's presidential election. During his rule, much of the aid to people living in Adiyaman has come from an interpretation of the religious tax known as "zakat". Other voters in the capital, Ankara and Istanbul believe that Adiyaman's people supported Erdogan, despite their suffering, because they have nowhere else to go.
A spate of scams carried out by people claiming to be spiritual figures promising to multiply small investments into immense wealth have left many Indonesians penniless. The scams have circulated widely on Indonesian social media, and some alleged scammers turn to violence when their victims come looking for their money. Just two dozen Facebook posts advertising so-called shaman investment schemes were viewed more than 1.4m times as of this week, according to AFP Fact Check reporters in Jakarta.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol plans to meet with South Korean survivors of the 1945 Hiroshima atomic bombing during his visit to Japan for the G7 summit. This will be Yoon's first meeting with the survivors since taking office a year ago. His spokesman says that this meeting shows "President Yoon's commitment to resolving past history issues, while improving relations for the future generations of both Korea and Japan". During his three-day trip, Yoon will also join the summit as an observer and hold bilateral talks with US President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
Tejay Fletcher, founder and leading administrator of fraud website iSpoof.cc, has been sentenced to 13 years and four months in prison by a London judge after pleading guilty to charges including possession of criminal property and transferring criminal property. The site was closed down in a series of global operations last year, with Fletcher earning at least £2m ($2.6m) from his $3.2m cryptocurrency Bitcoin earnings. Criminals were able to use the site to disguise calls as originating from trusted organisations such as banks, allowing them to empty their targets' accounts.
Transgender people in El Salvador continue to face discrimination and violence due to their gender identity, exacerbated by weak legal protection, a lack of social acceptance and the influence of Catholicism and evangelicalism. El Salvador’s supreme court ruled in 2022 that people should be able to alter the gender markers on their official documentation, but the government failed to meet a 2021 deadline to enact reform to facilitate that process. LGBTQ rights are said to be under threat in the country following a swing to the right in elections, with activists reporting increased homophobia and transphobia. Transgender citizens face practical challenges in their daily life due to misgendering or a lack of official documents that match their gender identity. Hospitals, banks and insurers are among those who refuse to respect the gender identities of transgender citizens. Violence against trans women in particular has increased in El Salvador in recent years, with police officers among those said to be operating with impunity.
The UK's independent Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) may be suffering from "efficiencies" that are inhibiting justice, wrote Ian Acheson in The Telegraph. The CPS, which operates according to the two tests of whether there is a realistic prospect of a successful conviction and whether a case is in the public interest, is under increasing fire from front-line police who claim that many cases are over-engineered with risk aversion so as to prevent prosecution. Acheson suggested the CPS should adopt a European-style of collaboration, where a prosecutor could become involved far earlier and have greater authority.
A historical mortar bomb has been destroyed by the Irish Army following its discovery during a search for the disappeared at Bragan Bog in County Monaghan. Searches have been ongoing to locate the body of Columba McVeigh who was one of 16 murder victims. This is the sixth attempt to locate his body. The 19-year-old was kidnapped in 1975 and his family have denied the IRA claim that he was an informer. The Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains paused the search due to winter conditions last year, resuming work last month.
Tejay Fletcher, the mastermind behind the £100m iSpoof fraud platform, has been sentenced in the UK to over 13 years in prison at Southwark Crown Court. Fletcher's website offered subscribers digital tools enabling them to pose as bank staff so as to scam their victims, many of whom were UK bank customers. Prosecution noted losses in excess of £43m in the UK alone from iSpoof's activities. Fletcher personally received bitcoin worth £2m from the scam and was found to have a Lamborghini, two Range Rovers and a Rolex when arrested.
Tejay Fletcher, the founder and leading administrator of banking scam iSpoof, has been sentenced to 13 years in jail after pleading guilty to four charges, including possession of criminal property and encouraging or assisting the commission of an offence. At its height, iSpoof had 59,000 users and Fletcher made around £2m from the site, purchasing, among other items, a Lamborghini, two Range Rovers and an £11,000 Rolex. The UK's biggest ever fraud sting saw Fletcher convicted of defrauding individuals and business around the world of more than £100m.
York Regional Police is urging other victims of a grandparent scam to come forward. Last March, an investigation began into the scam, which involved victims receiving calls requesting money to help a grandchild or relative who had been jailed or was facing legal trouble. After each call, a man came to the victims’ homes wearing a medical mask to collect the money that they had managed to obtain. A 51-year-old man from Bramtpon is currently being charged with fraud over $5,000, conspiracy, and extortion. York Regional Police believe that there may be more victims in addition to the four who have already come forward.
Tejay Fletcher, the mastermind behind the iSpoof.cc website, has been unmasked as the bright young man behind millions of phone scams that tricked people into believing they were being called by their banks or other trusted institutions. The website allowed criminals to disguise their phone numbers and perpetrate fraud on an industrial scale, scamming victims out of £100m of their hard earned cash. Fletcher, 35, who ran the website, was jailed for an effective 13 years following his arrest in 2019 in what is the biggest anti-fraud operation mounted in the UK. The number of people using iSpoof.swelled to 69,000, with as many as 20 people per minute targeted by callers using the site. More than 10 million fraudulent calls were made using iSpoof in the year to August 2022. Users could only pay via Bitcoin. For a basic subscription fee of £150 a month, users got a set number of minutes to make automated bot calls.
Tejay Fletcher, the mastermind behind the iSpoof.cc website, has been unmasked as the bright young man behind millions of phone scams that tricked people into believing they were being called by their banks or other trusted institutions. The website allowed criminals to disguise their phone numbers and perpetrate fraud on an industrial scale, scamming victims out of £100m of their hard earned cash. Fletcher, 35, who ran the website, was jailed for an effective 13 years following his arrest in 2019 in what is the biggest anti-fraud operation mounted in the UK. The number of people using iSpoof.swelled to 69,000, with as many as 20 people per minute targeted by callers using the site. More than 10 million fraudulent calls were made using iSpoof in the year to August 2022. Users could only pay via Bitcoin. For a basic subscription fee of £150 a month, users got a set number of minutes to make automated bot calls.
Four people were injured in a shooting near a downtown Los Angeles apartment complex. The incident occurred early on 1 May, with witnesses claiming a shooter drove a white BMW SUV. The three victims described by the Los Angeles police are black males between the ages of 25 and 30. A 40-year-old Hispanic woman was also injured. All four were said to be standing in front of the thousand block of Ingraham Street when four male Hispanic suspects approached and fired multiple shots. The shooter fled the scene and the four victims have been transported to hospital for treatment.
Japan’s Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida and his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk-yeol, have visited a cenotaph in Hiroshima that honours Korean victims of the 1945 atomic bombing, in the first such joint visit by the two countries. The two leaders visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, laid white bouquets at the cenotaph, and bowed together at the site. Yoon later said that the “courageous” visit would “pave the way for a peaceful future” while expressing grief over the Korean victims of the atomic bomb. Kishida described the visit as “very meaningful for bilateral ties and also in praying for world peace.” The trip was immediately followed by a summit between the two countries. They agreed upon the joint visit to the memorial during their meeting in Seoul.
