The Daily Misanthrope

May 25, 2026  •  Misanthrope Index: 8.6 — Deep Walken

Folly of the Day

Aimee Bock Founded a Nonprofit to Distribute Meals to Children. She Converted It Into a $250 Million Fraud. The State Had Already Flagged Suspicious Patterns Before the Pandemic. She Continued for Years. She Was Sentenced to 500 Months.

The Minnesota Department of Education flagged suspicious patterns before the pandemic, which Bock apparently interpreted as confirmation that she could continue — and did, generating the evidence chain that prosecutors used to establish her knowledge of the fraud and secure 500 months in federal prison.

Source: MPR News

The Wire

The CEO of a Healthcare Software Company Was Convicted of a 'Cold, Calculated' $1 Billion Medicare Fraud Scheme. He Documented His Confidence in the Enterprise by Filming a Music Video at His Waterfront Property While Wearing a Dollar-Sign Necklace.

Brett Blackman built an automated platform to mass-generate fake doctors' orders, paid physicians to sign prescriptions without examining patients, billed Medicare over $1 billion for medically unnecessary equipment, and recorded his confidence in the scheme's invisibility on camera in a music video that investigators later watched.

Source: CBS News

The Wire

Greece's Parliament Voted to Lift the Immunity of 13 Ruling-Party MPs Under Investigation for a €23 Million EU Farm Subsidy Fraud. Prosecutors Had Wiretaps of Them Discussing Specific Farmers and Coordinating the Scheme by Phone.

Thirteen Greek MPs coordinated a €23 million EU agricultural subsidy fraud — filing claims for non-existent land and phantom livestock — using wiretapped phone calls to discuss specific cases and coordinate interventions, which is the communication method Greece's own judicial apparatus has used to build corruption cases since at least the 1990s.

Source: Euronews

The Wire

The FBI Created a Fake Cryptocurrency Token and Watched Ten Foreign Nationals From Four Crypto Firms Buy and Sell It to Themselves Thousands of Times. The Blockchain Recorded Every Transaction.

Employees at four cryptocurrency market-making firms inflated trading volumes by acting as buyer and seller simultaneously, confident that blockchain pseudonymity made their activity invisible to regulators — a confidence that did not survive the FBI's decision to simply create a token, watch them wash-trade it, and retrieve the immutable ledger record of every transaction.

Source: IRS Criminal Investigation

The Wire

Eleven Defendants Were Charged With Running Sham Auto Dealerships That Produced 100,000+ Fake License Plates From 2017 to 2024. They Advertised the Plates as a Way to Avoid Tolls and Parking Tickets. The Plates Were Linked to Six Homicides.

For seven years, the defendants ran the same scheme through the same sham dealerships without altering their methods, openly advertising the toll-evasion purpose to customers, and generating 100,000+ plates that collectively created a digital record at every toll booth and parking system specifically designed to be bypassed by the product they were selling.

Source: Daily Voice

LazyTown

A Man Went to a Holiday Inn to Cheat on His Wife. He Did Not Revoke Her Access to His Shared iCloud Account.

He shared his iCloud location with his wife, went to a hotel to cheat on her, and did not revoke the shared access — a thirty-second setting change that would have preserved the entire enterprise — which is a level of operational planning consistent with someone who did not believe consequences applied to him.

Source: Daily Dot

The Faithful

An Italian Man Told His Wife He Was at a Business Dinner. A Restaurant's Promotional TikTok Video Showed Otherwise. He Sued the Restaurant.

He dined publicly with a woman other than his wife, was filmed by the restaurant in the way restaurants publicly film their dining rooms, was recognized by his wife in the resulting video, and responded by filing a privacy complaint against the restaurant for recording the business dinner he had told his wife he was having.

Source: Dexerto

Campus Watch

Two Florida International University College Republicans Were Suspended for Two Years After a WhatsApp Group Chat Named 'Nazi Heaven' — Containing 400+ Uses of Racial Slurs, Antisemitic Content, and Explicit Calls for Violence — Was Exposed by the Miami Herald

Source: Inside Higher Ed

The worst of humanity, curated every morning — so you don't have to look.

Subscribe free →

Today's edition  ·  Archive  ·  Submit a tip