Biden’s Nominee for Secretary of Labor Wants ‘Wage Theft’ Cops

“”Wage theft” is a catch-all term for not paying workers what they are owed under the law, such as violating minimum wage or overtime regulations. It is a crime under the Fair Labor Standards Act and is enforced by the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division. It can involve business owners sneakily ripping off employees. It can also result from honest confusion or mistakes regarding what is owed.”

Health systems want government help fighting off the hackers

“Cyberattacks on health systems are on a steady rise, and their costs are mushrooming. Experts said there are a variety of reasons for the increase, including that criminals are getting more advanced and more aspects of health care are online.

When a cyberattack struck Sky Lakes Medical Center, a community hospital in southern Oregon, in late October 2020, its computers were down for three weeks. The most mundane tasks became arduous. Nurses had to check on critical patients every 15 minutes in case their vital signs changed. Doctors scribbled down their orders and the swelling mounds of paper took over whole rooms. In three weeks, the hospital ran through 60,000 sheets of paper.

Sky Lakes had to rebuild or replace 2,500 computers and clean its network to get back online. Even after it hired extra staff, it took six months to input all the paper records into the system. In total, John Gaede, Sky Lakes director of information services, says his organization spent $10 million — a big expense for a nonprofit with roughly $4.4 million in annual operating income (the organization did not pay a ransom).

For hospitals with limited budgets, there are questions about how well they can protect themselves. The attack on Sky Lakes was part of a wave of attacks in 2020 and 2021 connected to a criminal group in Eastern Europe.

“Our budgets typically have a margin of maybe 3 percent a year,” Gaede said, “but we’re supposed to compete with nation-state actors?”

Health data is lucrative on the black market, making hospitals a popular target. Plus, if a health system has ransomware insurance, criminals may think they’re guaranteed a payout. Ransomware ties up hospital records in encrypted files until a fee is paid.

“Back when ransoms were $50,000, it was cheaper to pay them than to deal with a lawsuit that would have cost far more,” says Omid Rahmani, associate director at Fitch Ratings, a credit rating agency, adding that ransoms now cost millions. “The landscape’s changed and because of that the cyber insurance side has changed — and that’s really connected to the rise of ransomware.”

In its annual cost of a data breach report, IBM writes the global average cost of an attack on a health system rose from about $7 million to over $9 million in 2021. But remediating these violations in the U.S. can be far more expensive.”

How California Deputies Became Highway Robbers

“An organized group of Southern California bandits has brazenly hijacked armored cars and grabbed hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. The heavily armed thieves reportedly have damaged trucks, hassled their victims, covered up video cameras—and even celebrated their haul. “Wowee!” and “way to go, buddy,” they allegedly cheered, after pulling a recent heist.

You’d be forgiven for assuming that this is the latest example of California’s ongoing crime wave, epitomized by “third world” scenes of pilfered freight trains and brazen smash-and-grab robberies. But it’s nothing of the sort. Actually, it’s more pernicious than the usual crime spree because a sheriff is the mastermind and his deputies are looting the armored cars.

For instance, San Bernardino County deputies stopped the same Empyreal Logistics armored-car driver twice and took a total of nearly $1.1 million in cash owned by legal marijuana dispensaries, per news reports. The government has not charged the armored-car company nor the cannabis firms with any crimes, but the sheriff keeps the cash, anyway. Critics are right to call it highway robbery.

Welcome to the dystopian world of civil-asset forfeiture, a drug-war relic that allows police—often at the behest of district attorneys—to take people’s cash, cars, and properties based on their suspicion that the property was involved in a crime. Officials never have to prove that the property’s owner was involved in a crime.

The agencies have every incentive to employ this strategy routinely given that they keep the proceeds and spend the money on vehicles, guns, and whatever. News reports found police so adept at abusing this process that they sometimes target people who own the kind of fancy SUVs and sports cars that they’d like to have available in their motor pool.

Not only does this process deprive Americans of their Fourth Amendment right to be safe against the government’s searches and seizures, but it undermines the credibility of law enforcement by turning cops into our adversaries. San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus claims that “80 percent of marijuana at dispensaries was grown illegally.” If that’s true, then the sheriff simply needs to, you know, go to court and prove it.”

The FBI Returned This Innocent Couple’s Safe Deposit Box. It Refuses To Give Back Many Others—and Is Trying To Seize $85 Million in Cash.

“”Not only was my stuff taken without just cause…It was taken by my own government, and they were asking me to prove my innocence and subject myself to an investigation to get my stuff back, which was unlawfully taken to begin with, and had no evidentiary value.”

Perhaps most pitiful is that the Snitkos are two of the lucky ones in this story. That word feels ill-fitting for anyone in their shoes. But while the FBI has acquiesced to giving select deposit boxes back, including the one owned by the Snitkos, they are refusing to surrender others, seeking instead to keep a collective $85 million in cash and an unspecified amount of gold, silver, and precious metals from unsuspecting people.

That includes Travis May, who stored gold and $63,000 in cash, and Joseph Ruiz, who had $57,000 in his box—his life savings, which he uses to pay his living and medical expenses, according to a recently amended lawsuit.

“After the government seized this property on March 22, 2021, [Ruiz] filed a claim with the FBI to retrieve it,” notes the complaint from the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian public interest law firm representing both men. “However, the government has informed attorneys for USPV that it intends to civilly forfeit Joseph’s property. At this time, the government has not provided Joseph with any notice of the purported civil forfeiture proceeding.””

“Should the government succeed, plaintiffs Jeni Verdon-Pearsons and Michael Storc, for instance, will forcibly donate their silver, though the suit notes that they, too, have not been provided with “the factual or legal basis for the purported civil forfeiture proceeding.””

‘Too sweet of a pie’: Cybercriminals steal $8B in Covid relief funds

“The Secret Service and Labor Department have been warning states for months that criminal networks are trying to steal billions of dollars in federal pandemic unemployment aid. But the overburdened and antiquated state systems that send out the checks have been unable to stop a lot of the fraud.

Using huge databases of stolen personal information, cybercriminals based everywhere from Nigeria to London have pocketed an estimated $8 billion meant for people forced out of work due to the coronavirus so far, the Labor Department’s inspector general told states last month. The IG predicts that $26 billion in the federal aid programs alone eventually could be lost to fraud.”

“state workforce agencies, stymied by decades-old IT systems and flooded with applications, have been ill-equipped to find and prevent the fraud, which appears to be far more extensive than the usual attempts to bilk government programs.”