• Luigi Mangione is under monitoring in a 9-by-7-foot federal solitary-confinement cell in Brooklyn.
• On Monday, he may be moved to the same protective unit as Diddy and SBF, who are in the same jail.
• A prison consultant called his conditions "miserable."

Luigi Mangione is being held in a 9-by-7-foot solitary-confinement cell at the federal jail in Brooklyn that also houses the rap mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs and the cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, Business Insider has learned.

The trio could be living together in the same 15-man protective-custody unit as early as Monday, Sam Mangel, a prison consultant who has knowledge of Mangione's housing, said.

Federal prison records confirmed Friday morning that Mangione, Combs, and Bankman-Fried were at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center.

Mangione is set to remain in solitary until at least Monday in one of MDC's small cinderblock Special Housing Unit cells — in a unit also known as "the SHU" and "the hole," Mangel said.

He'll eat meals in his cell, and inmates in his situation are typically allowed out for one hour of recreation or showering a day. Guards are supposed to check on him every 15 minutes.

"Miserable, just miserable," Mangel said when asked to describe conditions in federal solitary-confinement cells.

"SHUs are notoriously loud. You have people in there for psychiatric issues, for disciplinary reasons, and for withdrawal" from drugs, he said, adding: "So it is the loudest place in the jail — people are banging on their doors at all hours of the night."

Mangione is being held without bail on death-penalty-eligible federal charges in the December 4 ambush fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. He has yet to be arraigned on New York charges of murder as an act of terror, which carries a top sentence of life without parole.

New, high-profile inmates are often monitored in solitary cells in the days before their units are assigned, said Mangel, who said he had been in communication with the defense team through Craig Rothfeld, a prison consultant.

Rothfeld, who was in the audience for Mangione's first federal court appearance on Thursday, declined to comment.

"It's a standard protocol," Mangel said. "This is especially true for a young man that, you know, might have some psychiatric concerns or his legal team or the BOP has concerns," he added, referring to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

"Even though it's called the 'SHU,' it's not for disciplinary reasons. It's strictly for administrative reasons," Mangel said.

A Bureau of Prisons spokesperson declined to comment, saying: "For privacy, safety, and security reasons, we do not discuss the conditions of confinement for any individual including their housing assignments."

Karen Friedman Agnifilo told BI that neither she nor Marc Agnifilo, her cocounsel, had spoken to Mandel. They did not immediately comment on Mangione's jail conditions.

The husband-and-wife team's Manhattan firm, Agnifilo Intrater, also represents Combs, who is being held without bail while awaiting a trial scheduled for May 5 on federal sex-trafficking charges.

He has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

In representing Combs, the firm complained about conditions at MDC throughout three unsuccessful bail applications, arguing that there were frequent random lockdowns and that inmates were deprived of basic trial-preparation materials, such as folders and notebooks. Combs' attorney Marc Agnifilo called the conditions "horrific" in one court filing.

One former prosecutor described the federal jail as frequently too cold or too hot and crawling with cockroaches — basically, "hell on earth."

Mangione's solitary-confinement cell would be equipped with a metal bunk-style bed and a steel one-piece combination toilet and sink. If he's lucky, the cell has a small built-in writing desk.

"You're usually only allowed out for one hour a day, but it could be more restrictive due to staffing issues, where you're only allowed out three times a week to take a shower or walk in a small, enclosed area," Mangel said.

Mangione would also be allowed out of his cell for attorney calls and visits, Mangel said.

"The defendant is actually sitting in a cage during the call," he said. "It's like a fenced-in area that has a monitor, and it's behind plexiglass, and the defendant is able to talk and have an unmonitored legal call during that time, usually for one-hour blocks."

Defendants can find these calls canceled at the last minute "because there's lockdowns and staffing issues," Mangel said, adding: "You get everything arranged, and then we're on the call, waiting, and the defendant never shows up."

He said he expected Mangione would have better access to phones and visitors after he's moved to the jail's protective custody early next week.

Mangel said he had been a prison consultant for Bankman-Fried, who is serving a 25-year sentence for stealing $8 billion from customers of his FTX crypto exchange. Bankman-Fried has remained at MDC's protective custody unit since his arrest last year.

Mangione's next federal court date was set for January 18. As of Friday morning, a date had not been set for his Manhattan arraignment on state murder charges.

This story has been updated to include responses from the BOP and Mangione's attorney.

Matthew Decker is the former chief information officer for Penn State University’s Applied Research Laboratory. As of October, he's also $250,000 richer.

In his Penn State position, Decker was well placed to see that the university was not implementing all of the cybersecurity controls that were required by its various contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense (DoD). It did not, for instance, use an external cloud services provider that met the DoD's security guidelines, and it fudged some of the self-submitted "scores" it made to the government about Penn State's IT security.

So Decker sued the school under the False Claims Act, which lets private individuals bring cases against organizations on behalf of the government if they come across evidence of wrongdoing related to government contracts. In many of these cases, the government later "intervenes" to assist with the case (as it did here), but whether it does so or not, whistleblowers stand to collect a percentage of any fines if they win.

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• The government lost billions of dollars to fraud and improper payments last year.
• Both Musk and Ramaswamy have indicated they'll crack down on fraud through DOGE.
• Some experts told BI they're optimistic about action on fraud, but the DOGE leaders have to be willing to invest in the issue.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have an opportunity to take on fraud in government programs once President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

Musk and Ramaswamy are tasked with leading the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which seeks to reduce government waste and slash spending. Musk set a goal of cutting $2 trillion in annual outlays.

One of Musk and Ramaswamy's aims for DOGE could lead to a relatively early win with bipartisan support: eliminating fraud in federal programs like Medicare. In a recent interview, Ramaswamy told CNBC that "the dirty little secret is that many of those entitlement dollars aren't even going to people who they were supposed to be going to in the first place."

"There are hundreds of billions of dollars of savings to extract" through basic fraud prevention measures, he said.

Musk shared that sentiment, posting on X in November: "The sheer magnitude & audacity of government fraud is mind-blowing!"

Data from the Government Accountability Office showed that government agencies have made about $2.7 trillion in improper payments since 2003, and in fiscal year 2023, the GAO estimated agencies made $236 billion in improper payments. Notably, those improper payments include other categories than intentional fraud, like administrative errors, Orice Williams Brown, the GAO's chief operating officer, said in a September testimony to Congress.

"While all fraudulent payments are considered improper, not all improper payments are due to fraud," Brown said.

The top impacted agencies were Medicare and Medicaid, which the GAO said had $51 billion and $50 billion in improper payments, respectively, followed by pandemic programs, including the Paycheck Protection Program.

Experts told Business Insider that there's potential for DOGE to make progress on the issue if they focus on effective solutions like system modernization and improved data analysis, an area where Ramaswamy and Musk could leverage their Silicon Valley tech experience.

Both fraud and improper payments have been difficult for the government to address because of "outdated technology and a limited focus on program integrity," Linda Miller, cofounder of the Program Integrity Alliance — a group that focuses on fraud prevention in the government — told BI.

"You need to use advanced technology and data in order to really move the needle," Miller said. "And the government is not using advanced technology and data to solve this problem."

Jetson Leder-Luis, an assistant professor at Boston University and researcher on government fraud, told BI that DOGE could pursue "a lot of low-hanging fruit ideas" to combat fraud in big industries like healthcare.

"I think DOGE has the opportunity to make big strides on fraud," Leder-Luis said, adding that if they boost enforcement funding and create enhanced data pipelines, "they have a major opportunity to save tens of billions of dollars."

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.

How government programs make way for fraud

The government has been unable to implement widescale fraud intervention in recent decades because of a lack of resources and staff to investigate fraud, and a failure to modernize data and technology systems, according to Miller and Leder-Luis.

The GAO found that the government's annual financial losses from fraud were between $233 billion and $521 billion, based on data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022.

Miller pointed to the pandemic as the "perfect storm" for fraud, with the Paycheck Protection Program and disaster loan programs as key examples. Miller said that all that aid being available, coupled with limited oversight at the government level during a national emergency, made it easier for fraud to go undetected; some of the programs allowed individuals to self-certify their loan applications, paving the way for misrepresentations.

"The lack of modernization of our digital technology at the state government level was a real hindrance to fraud prevention during the pandemic," Leder-Luis said.

There have been a number of instances where individuals attempt, and sometimes succeed, to game the system and score welfare benefits that they're not entitled to. But, Miller said, the bigger concern is beyond the individual circumstances; it's the "large-scale fraud schemes" that have taken millions of dollars from the government. For example, the FBI opened an investigation into a scheme that Medicare officials said defrauded the program out of $3 billion after some companies billed the program for catheters patients never requested or used.

Lawmakers and the Department of Justice have worked to take action over the past years to address fraud, including with the federal Pandemic Response Accountability Committee that oversaw pandemic-era programs. Still, Miller said that while agencies are focused on getting benefits to the beneficiary, there still isn't enough attention on ensuring benefits are going to the right person.

"That's the kind of thing that I think really angers Americans," Miller said. "You wonder, 'What are your tax dollars going to if they're not stopping that kind of fraud?'"

Where DOGE can play a role

Miller said she expects DOGE to look for "quick wins" soon after Trump takes office. These could include modernizing IT systems and investing more resources into fraud detection. A critical point DOGE will have to contend with is that cracking down on the cost of fraud would require some upfront investments.

"It can be very helpful to have a private sector lens come in and look at this," Miller said, which is why Musk and Ramaswamy's backgrounds could be useful in introducing new technology to government systems. However, she said, the two DOGE leaders have to be willing to invest in new fraud detection systems because, even amid their goals to slash spending, modernizing technology is not going to be free.

The GAO's Brown also outlined recommendations for federal agencies to better prevent fraud, including using external data from third parties to verify information Americans provide on loan and insurance applications.

With Republicans soon holding control of both Congress and the White House, DOGE's recommendations to Trump and lawmakers would likely see an easier path to passage. Addressing fraud has also seen Democratic support; Rep. Jamie Raskin introduced the Government Spending Oversight Committee Act in April, which would give federal inspectors general tools to combat fraud across major funding bills.

To be sure, some lawmakers and experts are skeptical of DOGE's approach. The US spent $6.75 trillion in fiscal year 2024, data from the Treasury Department showed, and it wouldn't be as simple as the DOGE leaders have said to ax that spending, lawyers told BI.

While administrative law requires a lengthy process to rescind regulations in federal agencies, Musk and Ramaswamy previously said they would recommend a list of regulations that Trump could "immediately pause." Some lawyers previously said the process is a lot more complicated, and the DOGE leaders would likely face legal hurdles if they pursued that route.

Musk and Ramaswamy also aren't the first to suggest cuts to government spending. Former President Ronald Reagan's Grace Commission, aimed at eliminating waste and inefficiency in the federal government, eliminated $22 billion in social welfare programs that ended up being offset by his tax cuts and defense spending.

Still, Leder-Luis said, what DOGE determines as "waste" is up for interpretation, whereas fraud is illegal, and there's support across the aisle to take that on.

"If we lose $50 billion a year to fraud in just the healthcare system alone, that's ultimately paid for by us," Leder-Luis said. "There are so many things that people want the government to be able to pay for that we all think are good and valuable, like better roads and schools. And when we say, 'I'm sorry, we can't afford that,' well, we are affording healthcare fraud instead."

A bitcoin investor who went to increasingly great lengths to hide $1 million in cryptocurrency gains on his tax returns was sentenced to two years in prison on Thursday.

It seems that not even his most "sophisticated" tactics—including using mixers, managing multiple wallets, and setting up in-person meetings to swap bitcoins for cash—kept the feds from tracing crypto trades that he believed were untraceable.

The Austin, Texas, man, Frank Richard Ahlgren III, started buying up bitcoins in 2011. In 2015, he upped his trading, purchasing approximately 1,366 using Coinbase accounts. He waited until 2017 before cashing in, earning $3.7 million after selling about 640 at a price more than 10 times his initial costs. Celebrating his gains, he bought a house in Utah in 2017, mostly funded by bitcoins he purchased in 2015.

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Kelly is aware that she should have been more careful when she signed up for a weight-loss medication online. She knows she should have looked into the company selling it, but, as she puts it, "desperate times call for desperate measures." She had gastric-bypass surgery in 2011, and that worked for a while, but then she started to gain the weight back after the "food noise" returned. "It's not like alcohol where you can abstain," she says. "You have to eat."

In May, she signed up for a subscription with Zealthy, a telehealth company she found through Google. It seemed simple enough: She was charged a subscription fee and a fee for the medication she ordered, semaglutide, which is basically generic Ozempic. She quickly noticed her food cravings and appetite had decreased. About six weeks later, she noticed she was losing weight. But then the billing got weird. Screenshots of the company's billing portal show that in September she was charged three times for one medication on top of the subscription fee and a separate "manual entry" charge of nearly $400. In October, her medication never arrived; the company blamed shipping delays on hurricanes in Florida. She tried to resolve the problem through the company's chat service and emails, trying to get the medication or a refund, but eventually, she gave up after failing to make progress on either front. She canceled the card she had on the account to prevent further charges. After filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, Kelly, which is a pseudonym, has gotten some of her money back, but she's still out hundreds of dollars. Zealthy didn't respond to a request for comment.

The topic of embarrassment came up throughout our conversation. Kelly has been overweight her whole life, and many people aren't particularly nice about it — they don't understand why she can't manage with just diet and exercise. "My pants don't fit if I so much as look at a cookie," she says. The experience with Zealthy only added to this sense of ostracism. Kelly's ashamed that she gained the weight back, that she let her guard down, and that she was taken for a ride.

But Kelly isn't alone: The explosion of new weight-loss medications has opened the door for all sorts of questionable business practitioners and outright scams. Drugs promising to help people lose weight are everywhere, and the fact that society prizes being thin — and punishes those who aren't — makes vulnerable people susceptible to tricks.

The diabetes and weight-loss drugs semaglutide and tirzepatide — which are generally referred to as GLP-1s and which you probably know by the names Ozempic or Wegovy, made by Novo Nordisk, and Mounjaro or Zepbound, made by Eli Lilly — have been game changers in obesity treatment and management. For people struggling with their weight, these drugs can seem like a miracle. But because the brand-name medications are so expensive and difficult to get, many people, like Kelly, are turning to other sources, buying copycats from online telehealth companies and sellers that have very little, if any, oversight.

Compounded versions of the drugs have been effective for many people, even if the Food and Drug Administration doesn't approve them and has warned against taking them. But not everyone has been so lucky. In Kelly's case, she's out a chunk of money. (She's not the only one with issues with Zealthy: The federal government has sued the company, alleging unfair and deceptive conduct including billing customers for things they didn't knowingly agree to and misleading people about their subscriptions.) For others, the consequences are not only financial but medical. Poison-control centers reported an enormous jump in semaglutide-related calls last year. One recent study looking at websites advertising semaglutide without a prescription found that 42% of the sites belonging to online pharmacies were part of illegal operations.

"We're a little bit in the Wild West," said John Hertig, an associate professor at Butler University's College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. "It's just exploded so fast. There's so much money to be made here."

The marketplace is awash in companies trying to ride the Ozempic wave by selling compounded semaglutide, knockoff drugs, and similar-sounding supplements. Last year NBC News found that there were more ads on Instagram and Facebook mentioning semaglutide than there were ads for Viagra on the platforms. Semaglutide content is all over TikTok, much of it dubious. Phishing scams that use the medications as the hook have increased, as have other schemes designed to get people's data or payment information with the promise of access to the drugs. Reddit and the Better Business Bureau's website are filled with complaints about telehealth companies offering GLP-1 products — people describe unwittingly signing up for pricey subscriptions, never receiving medication, or finding it impossible to quit. It can be hard to discern a safe, legitimate offer from a dupe. Complicating things is that the FDA hasn't clearly established what's OK here, leaving consumers to figure things out for themselves. Even big-name telehealth companies are sending medications to patients without a lot of supervision.

"Every medication carries a risk, and they don't affect everyone equally," said Jessica Bartfield, a clinical associate professor at Wake Forest University's Bariatric and Weight Management Center. "So when you see these images and testimonials and stories about people who are on it for maybe inappropriate purposes or who are losing tremendous weight or who aren't being monitored the right way, then it normalizes it, and people think that that's OK."

The body-positive movement has spread the message over the past decade or two that you can and should love your body at any size and that health and beauty are not synonymous with thinness. That movement isn't necessarily a failure, but the rush to get semaglutide shows that American culture's preference toward skinny never went away, said Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a history professor at The New School who wrote the book "Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession."

"It's very clear that there are still a lot of people who — medical issues aside — really want to be thin," she said.

As much as the FDA and doctors might tell people that off-brand semaglutide and other products are risky, people aren't necessarily deterred from seeking them out. They see others getting results, and they want the same.

"You don't see this with cancer treatment. You don't see this with blood-pressure medications. You don't see this with antibiotics," Bartfield said. "This is a very unique field, and I can appreciate the appeal."

The rush of gray-market semaglutide and scams riffing on the desire for the drugs are a confluence of market need and market want — some people who really do need to lose weight for medical reasons are turning to alternative methods because they can't get or afford the "official" stuff, while others are using the medications more out of vanity. After all, the pursuit of dubious miracle products in the name of being thin and attractive has existed forever.

"I mean, Jane Fonda tells stories of mailing away for tapeworms," Mehlman Petrzela said. "In the '90s — and this is an approved thing — Olestra was a fat substitute, and the warning was anal leakage. And people were like, 'OK, whatever, if it makes you skinny.'"

The promise of being thin is an incredibly effective marketing tactic and one that's hard to resist, especially with this new class of drugs. My Instagram feed is filled with nearly indistinguishable ads for weight-loss medications that show a little vial of some clear substance, list facts and figures about weight loss, and mention how expensive the real stuff is. Sometimes it takes me a second to realize I'm looking at an ad, because it's just a person talking to the camera. Mehlman Petrzela told me she often sees ads for supplements promising to be "nature's Ozempic" on her feed. An acquaintance recently mentioned that after seeing all the ads, she signed up with a telehealth company to see if she qualified to get compounded semaglutide. After a consultation, she was denied. (She's quite thin and pretty clearly didn't need them.) But then, months later, she noticed the company had been quietly withdrawing $30 from her bank account each month. She'd missed it because the purchases were categorized as "groceries."

Eric Feinberg has researched Ozempic scams on TikTok in his role as vice president of content moderation at the Coalition for a Safer Web. He told me the social-media platform's algorithm is good at sending people down a "rabbit hole" of content once it figures out they might be interested in losing weight. "I'm not searching TikTok videos on Ozempic; it's coming right through my feed," he said. "That's the danger."

As part of his research, Feinberg engages with people purporting to be selling Ozempic or some version of it on TikTok. He sent screenshots of one of his recent exchanges with an account called Ozempicweightloos0 where the seller sent over a list of prices ranging from $90 for 0.25 milligrams of Ozempic to $110 for 1 mg. (For comparison, Novo Nordisk's website lists the price of 1 mg of Ozempic as $968.52.) The account stopped responding after he asked where the medication shipped from. It's a type of conversation he's had often — and alerted lawmakers and TikTok to.

Michael Jabbara, a senior vice president and global head of fraud services at Visa, said it saw a huge spike in chatter on the dark web about weight-loss scams in May and June. He posited that it was tied to the World Health Organization's warning around that time about fake semaglutide: The WHO noticed enough nefarious activity to issue an alert, triggering more conversations among bad actors about how well the scams are working. He said they realize that "this is a successful fraud scheme that is yielding a good return on investment for us, so we're going to continue to pursue it."

May and June are also the start of beach season, when people are looking to get their summer bodies — and maybe realizing it's too late unless they take some extreme measures. "Fraudsters are very attuned to cultural moments and what is attractive to consumers," Jabbara said. "They're very keen marketers."

One can't paint all the operators in the compounded-semaglutide and GLP-1 markets with a broad brush, because there's a lot of variation. There's a difference between major telehealth companies like Ro or Hims doling out prescribed medication and illegal pharmacies and scammers on WhatsApp or Telegram sending medications willy-nilly, if at all. But the reality is that everyone is operating in a bit of a gray area.

Except for the really sketchy stuff, compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide are generally coming from compounding pharmacies that make customized medications. Most of the time these pharmacies make medications for people with unique needs: You have an allergy to a certain dye usually used in the name-brand drug, so they make the drug without it for you. But when there's a shortage of the drugs — as there has been for GLP-1 drugs — the rules for compounding get a little looser, and the FDA allows copying.

There are some confusing wrinkles. For one thing, shortages don't last forever, and when they end, the copying is supposed to stop. The FDA took tirzepatide off its shortage list in the fall, which should have meant no more compounding. But after a compounding trade group sued the FDA over the decision, it said it would reevaluate.

Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly both have patents on their drugs, and they're not eager to give up their secret sauce — meaning it's not clear how close the compounded concoctions are to the real stuff. And though the FDA has warned people that all the compounded drugs are risky, it's at the same time somewhat greenlighting them, people are being inundated with ads for them, and people are trying them out. The cat's already out of the bag.

"We're in somewhat of a no-man's-land in terms of no clear regulation, reduced government oversight, and a straight lab-to-lap delivery model," said Anthony Mahajan, a founding partner at the Health Law Alliance, a healthcare-focused law firm.

He added that telehealth and direct-to-consumer GLP-1 sales circumvent many of the checkpoints in traditional prescribing. Because these prescriptions aren't covered by insurers and are instead paid for directly by the consumer, there's no inspection by the government or insurers reviewing whether a drug is medically necessary and deciding whether to authorize payment. Compounds are also generally exempt from a federal law meant to stop harmful drugs from getting into the US's supply chain, meaning checkpoints for product sourcing and supply-chain integrity are missing. "Oversight agencies are cut out," he said.

It's tough to blame consumers or the companies distributing compounded semaglutide for getting into this business, given how expensive and difficult it is to get the name-brand drugs. Insurers generally won't cover Ozempic or Mounjaro unless a patient has diabetes, meaning that to get the medications, people who want to use them for weight loss have to cough up thousands of dollars a year. That's assuming their doctors will prescribe them, which, some won't.

"If you don't price it appropriately, if you don't have enough supply, then people are always going to find another way to get it," Hertig said. "And sometimes that other way to get it is safe, but in many examples it's not."

To ward off telehealth companies, Eli Lilly cut the price of Zepbound for certain patients who order directly from the company, though the drug is still pricey.

To some extent, this is a tale as old as time: People want to be thin and will go to great lengths to achieve that, and businesses are happy to oblige. But GLP-1 medications do seem to have put this dynamic into overdrive. These drugs really are everywhere — in commercials, on social media, in the news, in conversations. And everyone's getting into the semaglutide game: diet companies, gyms, even grocery stores.

Maybe this will all turn out fine. The regular versions of the drugs will become more available, and the generic ones will, by and large, work fine. Sure, there will be scams; that's true of everything. But that's not the only possible outcome. Many people may wind up not only losing money but also harming their bodies by injecting medications that aren't safe. And these medications are so new that it's hard not to worry that in five or 10 years we'll wonder why we allowed online companies to send compounded injected drugs around the country to people who were prescribed a medication after completing a five-minute survey.

Hertig said he expects tighter and clearer regulations on GLP-1s in the years ahead, which is good, though it doesn't help people trying to sort things out now. In the meantime, the miracle drug has people looking for miracles everywhere, including in places they shouldn't.

When people fall for traps or scams, they're often hesitant to admit it or advertise it. That's especially true for weight-loss products — the message American culture sends is that you're supposed to be thin and fit but you're not supposed to talk about how you do it. Society often treats being overweight as a moral failure and using a medication to take off pounds as cheating.

Kelly hasn't given up on semaglutide altogether. She's switched providers — she's now getting her medication from Hers — and continues to shed weight. The experience is "night and day." Her mom is nervous about her taking medication and worries about the unknowns, but that hasn't deterred Kelly. She hasn't told many people about the Zealthy experience, and she doesn't advertise that she's taking a weight-loss drug, though she'll be honest if people ask. Her doctor has been reluctant to prescribe her a GLP-1 medication, meaning she's still paying out of pocket. She thinks the reluctance was part of what landed her in a bad spot in the first place.

"That makes patients like myself especially vulnerable for fraud in the telemedicine world. We want and need to lose weight, have tried everything, and this is working for so many people," she said. "So we turn a blind eye to the risks."

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

On Tuesday, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation advised Americans to share a secret word or phrase with their family members to protect against AI-powered voice-cloning scams, as criminals increasingly use voice synthesis to impersonate loved ones in crisis.

"Create a secret word or phrase with your family to verify their identity," wrote the FBI in an official public service announcement (I-120324-PSA).

For example, you could tell your parents, children, or spouse to ask for a word or phrase to verify your identity if something seems suspicious, such as "The sparrow flies at midnight," "Greg is the king of burritos," or simply "flibbertigibbet." (As fun as these sound, your password should be secret and not the same as these.)

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Oh, Enron, I thought—hoped and dreamed?—you were long, long gone, confined to the dustbin of history reserved for seriously fraudulent companies.

But apparently not.

More than two decades after Enron's bankruptcy in December 2001, the company is back. Well, at least an entity using the website Enron.com went public on Monday, announcing Enron's relaunch as "a company dedicated to solving the global energy crisis."

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