Russian President Vladimir Putin signed on Wednesday a divisive bill into law that aims to increase the country’s sovereignty over its Internet and help defend against foreign cyber attacks. Critics, however, claim the law will further limit the country’s media freedom. 

The wife of Ukraine’s president-elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy bought in 2013 an upscale penthouse apartment on the Black Sea for less than half of its 2012 list price from a controlling shareholder of a bank enmeshed in a corruption investigation-- Reuters reported Wednesday.

A whistleblower lawsuit accused a US pharmaceuticals giant of lavishly bribing doctors and their staff to increase sales of a drug, offering them Starbucks gift cards, free Las Vegas trips and sponsored happy hours to prescribe it even for potentially unsafe uses.

Armenian police detained on Tuesday eight people and seized 14 computers from the offices of a suspected cyber crime ring operating in Yerevan. The raid came hours after OCCRP member center Hetq published an investigation that suggested the company was defrauding U.S. citizens of tens of thousands of dollars through fake virus scams.

The European Commission announced Monday it had adopted a new Anti-Fraud Strategy to improve the detection, sanctioning and prevention of fraud perpetrated against the EU budget.

An Indian national who operated a network of fraudulent call centers that intimidated and defrauded US residents out of hundreds of millions of dollars was arrested and extradited from Singapore to the US on Friday.

Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Najib Razak received a mysterious sum of US$626 million into his private bank account during his tenure as the country’s prime minister--part of which was a donation from a Saudi prince.

Over 200 victims of human trafficking, 157 of them children, were rescued by police in Benin and Nigeria in an operation led by Interpol.

Gold worth billions of dollars is smuggled every year out of Africa through the United Arab Emirates and it most likely ends up in Europe and in the United States, according to a Reuters analysis published last week.

A UK judge this week ordered a convicted money launderer who was caught attempting to board a flight to Dubai with US$1.93 million (£1.5 million) in cash last August to forfeit the confiscated funds permanently, the National Crime Agency (NCA) said in a press release.