https://dailymisanthrope.com A daily catalogue of human folly. Reporting the follies of humanity. Without illusion. en-us Mon, 18 May 2026 16:22:57 GMT https://dailymisanthrope.com/assets/banner.jpg https://dailymisanthrope.com https://dailymisanthrope.com/?date=2026-05-18 https://dailymisanthrope.com/?date=2026-05-18 Mon, 18 May 2026 17:00:00 GMT Shaohua Sun, 39, of Monterey Park, and Yanwen Gu, 40, of Rosemead, called an elderly victim posing as credit union fraud prevention, warned of a fraudulent $350 Apple Store charge, and convinced the victim to withdraw $25,000 as 'evidence.' They called back to request $50,000 more. At the time of the second call, the victim was mid-conversation with police, describing the first incident. Officers arranged a second meeting. Gu arrived to collect the $50,000 and was arrested. Sun was identified nearby as the lookout and arrested as well. Both have since pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit elder abuse. Sun reimbursed the original $25,000. The second call represents the operation's foundational logic in its clearest form: the first call had worked, therefore a second call would also work. The variable the team failed to model was the police officer sitting with their victim at the moment the phone rang. They called to run the second scam while the victim was actively reporting the first one to police — which is the kind of timing that suggests the operation did not include a threat-assessment stage. Stupid Criminals https://dailymisanthrope.com/?date=2026-05-17 https://dailymisanthrope.com/?date=2026-05-17 Sun, 17 May 2026 17:00:00 GMT Gladwin Gill, a doctor, and Amelou Gill, a psychologist, operated 626 Hospice — doing business as St. Francis Palliative Care — in California. The business model was uncomplicated: enroll patients in hospice care, classify them as terminally ill, collect Medicare reimbursements. The difficulty was the outcomes. After five years, 97% of their terminal patients were still alive. Medicare auditors eventually noticed that this figure did not correspond to what 'terminal' is generally understood to mean. The Gills and seven co-defendants were charged on April 2, 2026. Investigators also noted that the office plaza where 626 Hospice operated housed 89 registered hospices — a concentration of end-of-life care that the neighborhood had not otherwise requested. The 97% survival rate was not a billing anomaly. It was the entire operation, reduced to a single number that answered every question anyone might ask about it. When 97 percent of your terminal patients survive five years, you have not discovered a better treatment — you have published your fraud in the billing data. Graft & Government https://dailymisanthrope.com/?date=2026-05-16 https://dailymisanthrope.com/?date=2026-05-16 Sat, 16 May 2026 17:00:00 GMT Patrick Alexander of Chesterfield County, South Carolina, was brought before Judge John Davis on a misdemeanor trespassing charge. His bond was set at $250. Alexander reached into his pocket, produced three counterfeit $100 bills, handed them to the judge, and said, 'Keep the change.' The judge accepted the money, noticed the bills looked off, and used a counterfeit-detection pen to confirm they were fake. Alexander was immediately charged with felony forgery and misdemeanor contempt of court. His bond was reset at more than $6,000. He remains, by any measure, $5,750 worse off than when he walked in. The original trespassing charge — a $250 misdemeanor — is now the least of his problems. There is a kind of geometry to this case that rewards attention: the man was in a courtroom, standing before a judge, in the middle of a judicial proceeding, and decided that this was the moment to pass counterfeit currency. The 'keep the change' was not a mistake. It was a flourish. It converted a transaction into a statement. The statement has since been entered into the record. He was in court for a $250 charge. He paid with counterfeit bills. He told the judge to keep the change. The bond is now $6,000. The flourish was the error. Stupid Criminals https://dailymisanthrope.com/?date=2026-05-15 https://dailymisanthrope.com/?date=2026-05-15 Fri, 15 May 2026 17:00:00 GMT For five years, Annalouise Spence served as personal secretary to Judith Neilson, one of Australia's wealthiest philanthropists. For those same five years, Spence allegedly used Neilson's business credit accounts to run an uninterrupted luxury shopping programme totalling AUS$1.6 million. The inventory includes: $59,000 on a pink-gold Rolex, $64,000 in personalised diamond and gold jewellery, $23,000 at Loro Piana in a single week, $30,000 with Mytheresa, $38,757 for a five-night stay at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, $29,118 in first-class flights and tickets to see The Cure in Seattle, and $16,000 on a racing bicycle for her husband. She also charged $1,000 for napkins bearing her own initials. The scheme's defining moment came when Spence threw herself a 50th birthday party at the Capella Hotel in Sydney. She charged it to Neilson. Neilson attended. Neither the party nor its financing appears to have been discussed. The fraud was eventually discovered in September 2025 when a staff member reconciling bank accounts noticed the Rolex purchase and flagged it. Spence has since been charged with 82 counts of fraud — 14 added in the most recent filing — and has been denied bail. Her defence cited mental health issues. She has repaid $840,000 since the discovery, which confirms the money was somewhere. The napkins, presumably, are still in service. She charged the birthday party to the woman seated at the table with her. The $1,000 monogrammed napkins were the optimistic detail that made the rest inevitable. Trusted Employees https://dailymisanthrope.com/?date=2026-05-14 https://dailymisanthrope.com/?date=2026-05-14 Thu, 14 May 2026 17:00:00 GMT The Government Accountability Office reports that 15 federal agencies disbursed approximately $186 billion in improper payments during fiscal year 2025 — an increase of $24 billion over the prior year. Medicare and Medicaid account for $94 billion of the total. Six programs reported improper payment rates exceeding 25 percent; nineteen exceeded 10 percent. Since the GAO began tracking these figures in 2003, the cumulative total has reached $3 trillion. This number is, the GAO notes, 'likely significantly higher,' as not all agencies comply with reporting requirements and some of the reports that are filed are not accurate. The instinct here is to reach for some withering observation about scale, but scale is perhaps the wrong register. The more interesting question is what a 25 percent improper payment rate means operationally. It means one in four payments went somewhere they were not supposed to go, and the system registered this as a performance metric rather than a catastrophe. The Medicaid error surge, the report notes, resulted from 'increased errors in eligibility redeterminations and provider screening while phasing out COVID-era flexibilities' — which translates, in plain English, to: the agency suspended its own rules during the pandemic, forgot how to follow them, and is now making more errors trying to remember. Three trillion dollars. Twenty-three years. The forms are all still in triplicate. Six programs with improper payment rates above 25 percent. One agency's explanation: they stopped waiving their own rules and forgot how the rules worked. The American Project