US Court Charges Eight “Influencers” Over 12 Fraud Cases Worth US$114 Million

Eight individuals who portrayed themselves as social media influencers in the US were recently charged with 12 counts of fraud by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The suspects and scammer group are said to have conspired to run a pump-and-dump scheme, where they would target companies and purchase thousands of dollars in stock, and then scam people by selling them as “hot tickets” on their respective social media accounts.

Collectively, the 8-member scammer group had around 1.5 million followers on Twitter, but they also had a server on Discord called “Atlas Trading”. In order to lend credibility to their schemes, the group also claimed to be Wall Street experts on a trading podcast called “Pennies: Going in Raw”, hosted by two of the scammer group’s cohorts, Daniel Knight and Mitchell Hennessey.

It should be noted that the scammer group believed that their conversations on Discord were private, but investigators had reportedly recorded their discussions or retrieved transcripts of them. Naturally, it doesn’t help their case that the documents contain really damning statements, several of which have members of the group outrightly acknowledging that what they’re doing could and will get them into hot water with the law.

One member of the scammer group, Knight, practically admitted that what his group did was akin to robbing folks; during a Discord chat, when the participants were discussing targetting a company called GTT Communications and buying its stocks “in the right way”, Knight simply responded with the followed reply:

“The f**king right way? We’re robbing f**king idiots of their money.”

Both the US DOJ and SEC state that in the two years that the scammer group was in business, it collected more that US$114 million (~RM502 million) in profits, in small increments over the period. As an example of how that works: the group bought over 300000 shares in GTT Communications at US$1.76 (~RM7.76) per share. Following their purchase, it would then dump all the shares at US$1.99 (~RM8.77) after misleading its followers by claiming that they were on the verge of “something big”.

All eight members of the scammer group now stand accused of 11 counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud by the DOJ. Each count carries a life sentence, which is 25 years in the US. That means if they are found guilty on all counts, they’ll be in jail for nearly 300 years. Mind you, that’s just the criminal indictments; the SEC has its own issues against the group as well, and the government body could strip away the group’s ill-gotten gains, as well as impose additional financial penalties too.

Monster Hunter Rise Comes To PC On 12 January 2022

Monster Hunter Rise was released for the Nintendo Switch earlier in March this year. One would think that it would be either six or 12 whole months before a PC port made an appearance. At the Tokyo Games Show, Capcom announced that it was neither, but closer to the latter. Specifically, the game will be available on PC from 12 January 2022 onwards.

The PC version of Monster Hunter Rise will come with all the extra features that you’d expect for the platform. Among them are things like widescreen support, 4K resolution, higher framerates and better higher resolution textures. It will also come with in-game voice chat support.

Being released so late in its life cycle, the PC version of Monster Hunter Rise will also come with all the DLC that’s available to the Nintendo Switch, at least up until November 2021. For those who want to experience the game earlier, Capcom also says that a demo for the game will be available on 13 October.

Prior to the PC release of Monster Hunter Rise, Capcom also announced an expansion for the game, Sunbreak, which is set to release in summer 2022. For those of us without four seasons, this means between late June and late September. And it will be a simultaneous release for both platforms. Which makes the timing of the base game’s PC port a little strange, if not outright late.

EA: Battlefield 2042 Early Access Date Is Now 12 November

Electronic Arts has very recently confirmed that Battlefield 2042 has been pushed back to 19 November. At the time, video games leaker Tom Henderson claimed that this will also push back the open beta and early access dates to October. But now, it looks like it will be pushed even further back than that.

Adam Freeman, EA Europe’s community manager, has shared on Twitter that the new early access date for Battlefield 2042 has now been pushed back to 12 November. This puts it just a week before the launch of the game.

This small window makes the open beta date in a pretty precarious spot. If it retains the pattern of being two days after early access opens, this means that there will only be five days for the open beta phase of Battlefield 2042. Even if the so-called open beta is a glorified server stress test, it does feel like five days is too tight a window for anything to be done if anything does go south.

Freeman says that an exact date for the open beta will be shared later this month, which leaves things up in the air. But as it is, it does seem like the 19 November release of the game itself is quite set in stone.

Android 12 May Let Users Access Hidden Recycle Bin

With Android 11 having launched last year, it’s probably safe to expect Android 12 getting announced sometime this year. And one of the features the new mobile OS may feature is a recycle bin that users can access. XDA has found code referencing this in a developer build of the OS.

Android 11 has a version of the recycle bin built in already. That being said, it’s not something that users can freely access, like on a Windows PC. Instead, certain apps have the ability to restore certain types of files in the bin if they have the right permissions. One example is the Google Files app.

This could change with Android 12, where access to the recycle bin becomes system-wide. The recycle bin will possibly be placed under Settings > Storage. Though this will only allow you to empty the recycle bin. Restoring individual files will still require the Google Files app.

It’s a nice feature to have, especially if you frequently delete and restore files on PC. This will give the Android 12 experience a sense of parity, so to speak. That being said, as is the case with features found in unreleased versions of Android, this user-accessible recycle bin may not actually make it to the release version.