You’ve all heard those stories about people selling swamp land and so on …

Well rather than sell some sucker a bridge, a California man - Steven Ferguson - made off with $5 million dollars when he sold off a waste treatment plant in New Jersey.

the smooth talker promised huge returns on the investments that his soon to be victims thought was going to be a waste treatment plant.

He has since been sentenced to 11 years in prison and ordered to pay $6 million in fines.

Did you hear about the man, Ronald Evano, that was sentenced last month to more than five years in jail due to his role in a fraud scheme in which he and his wife are said to have intentionally eaten glass fragments in order to collect more than $200,000 in compensation from a multi-state insurance company?

Evano was also ordered to repay as much as $340,000 for his role in defrauding insurers, grocery stores, restaurants, hospitals and doctors in the scheme in which both he and his wife claimed that there was glass in the food that they had eaten.

The couple filed fraudulent insurance claims worth more than $200,000 and incurred more than $100,000 in unpaid medical bills between 1997 and 2005 across several states.

Evano plead guilty to charges in federal court to 20 counts of mail fraud, conspiracy, wire fraud, identity theft, and making false statements on health care matters and social security fraud.

Evano’s wife, Mary, remains a fugitive. An arrest warrant has been issued for Mary Evano listing the same charges that her husband plead guilty to in August.

Evano asked the judge for mercy, saying in court that he and his wife are members of the minority Roma community, and needed the money to pay for dowries and other costs associated with the marriages of his sons under cultural practices.

Custom Officials discovered approximately 10.5 ounces of ecstasy tablets hidden inside a Mr. Potato Head toy that was sent to Australia from Ireland.

When the Australian Custom officials opened the parcel they were greeted with the smiling face of this popular children’s toy. However when they removed the back panel of the toy they found the ecstasy tablets contained in a plastic bag.

Officials turned the matter over to federal police. No arrests have been made at this time as the case is still under investigation. The maximum penalty for importing drugs to Australia is life imprisonment.

“Whilst this is one of the more unusual concealments that we have seen in recent times, people need to be aware that Customs officers are alert to unusual and often outlandish methods of concealment,” Customs Director Post Karen Williams said.

We often hear news stories about those who’ve been wrongly convicted being freed from jail, sometimes after being incarcerated for many years. The newly freed often sue the legals system for wrongful confinement.

Three men in Birmingham, England who were recently freed after respectively spending 18, 18 and 11 years in prison for murder, were, in separate trials, awarded a total of 2.16 million British pounds.

Unfortunately for these men the Court of Appeal ruled in March that the mean will each have to give back 25% of their award to the government as compensation for their “room and board”. You know, those tiny cells they stayed in and the awful prison food that they were served for years.

Isn’t that outrageous!