One thing that we think is really interesting is the Department of Justice’s [DOJ] new Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative. What we think is so interesting about it is that DOJ often has initiatives. When I [Renée] was at DOJ, I headed up the Big Lender Initiative which was part of the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force after the big financial crisis, and we investigated and litigated against most major banks for making bad mortgages, put simply.
That was a huge initiative. Eva worked on the Big Pharma initiative that DOJ had for a number of years involving kickback schemes and “off-label” marketing. An initiative entails the DOJ putting a lot of focus, money, resources, efforts on that particular area or business sector. At that particular time after the financial crisis, there really was an effort to hold banks accountable and also to recover misspent federal dollars in different housing insurance programs. In the financial initiative it was really an effort to make sure that the mutual mortgage insurance fund was solvent for the first time in history. It was at risk of insolvency. There have been initiatives before, but it is the first time that even I have ever seen DOJ start an initiative and put out a huge call for whistleblowers. It’s just not something that they do. Of course, DOJ is often driven by whistleblower cases. In this instance, in October of last year, DOJ made several press...
Misinformation about hantavirus has run rampant on social media, with online users reviving viral COVID-19 theories to spread fake news about the outbreak. From conspiracy theories claiming that...