Author: completebodyneeds

A Florida insurance agent faces years in prison after he pleaded guilty to fraudulently arranging more than $300,000 in premium financing for fake companies, then diverting much of the money to his personal use. Daniel Raney, 41, who managed Raney Insurance and Raney Ventures in Pensacola, was arrested in August after the premium finance company, AFCO Direct, became suspicious, according to the arrest affidavit. The associate general counsel with AFCO filed a complaint with the Florida Department of Financial Services in June 2024, after installment payments on the premium finance loan had stopped, an investigator with DFS explained. The purported…

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has issued an investigative subpoena to OpenAI, as part of a broader inquiry into cybersecurity incidents and risks related to its AI models, his office said on Thursday. Last month, Bonta announced that the Department of Justice was conducting a formal investigation into the “Hugging Face incident,” amid increasing scrutiny of the AI industry. Related: AI Safety Measures Widely Backed by Most Americans, Poll Finds AI agents developed by OpenAI hacked Hugging Face earlier this year, gaining access to parts of the open-source platform’s infrastructure and exposing the cybersecurity risks associated with increasingly capable AI…

Advanced artificial intelligence tools may have been used in a cyberattack on South Korea’s Shinhan Bank Co. that exposed information on about 25,000 customers, Yonhap News reported, highlighting the risk of automated hacking against financial institutions. Attackers probably used sophisticated AI agents to probe for vulnerabilities and gain unauthorized access to a service used by loan recruiters, Yonhap said, citing cybersecurity experts. Shinhan Bank, a unit of Shinhan Financial Group Co., said Thursday that an unauthorized external party accessed certain services and obtained customer information. The lender is investigating the cause, scope and potential impact with authorities and outside cybersecurity…

Facing a ruling that could expose its local parishes and schools to liability, no progress in settlement talks, and rising litigation costs, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington, Vermont has taken the unusual step of asking the U.S. bankruptcy court to dismiss its Chapter 11 case that it filed two years ago to deal with clergy sexual abuse claims. The surprise move came just days after the church’s $29.4 million settlement offer was rejected by the Committee of Unsecured Creditors that represents 120 claimants. When it made the offer, which amounts to $247,000 per person, the diocese told the committee…

The tanker captain summoned his years of experience when he saw the blast in front of him. He veered his 300-meter-long ship around the vessel ahead and could see a fire had started. He called the US Navy to tell them of the attack. The maneuver in the Strait of Hormuz with drones and missiles overhead is the sort of quick thinking that’s proving vital to getting oil supplies to the global market as Washington and Tehran fail to reach agreement on reopening the waterway to regular traffic. The account of the incident, told to Bloomberg by a captain in…

UK police said they arrested a sixth man, a British-Iranian dual national, in relation to an incident near an airbase used by the US to launch strikes on Iran. The 27-year-old man was arrested in London on suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts. Another man, a British national, was questioned under caution and two properties in the area were searched. “The investigation into circumstances surrounding events in Gloucestershire is hugely complex, and our specialist teams are interrogating multiple lines of inquiry,” Vicki Evans, senior national coordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing, said in a statement on Thursday evening. “We’re looking at…

Fifteen US states sued agrichemicals company Corteva on Thursday, alleging that the spinoff of its seed and genetics business into Vylor was designed to shield the company’s best assets from tens of billions of dollars in potential liabilities tied to PFAS “forever chemicals” that have polluted the environment. Corteva completed the Vylor spinoff into a separate publicly traded company on Thursday. The lawsuit, filed in Indiana state court by a bipartisan group of state attorneys general and the territory of Guam, alleges that Vylor received the “crown jewels” of Corteva’s business without assuming any responsibility for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances…

The International Criminal Court has ended its contract with French life and health insurer AXA starting October 1 and will now be using a new health insurance provider, a spokesperson for the Hague-based court said. The spokesperson gave no reason for the decision, which was first reported on Thursday by the Financial Times, and declined to name the new insurance provider. President Donald Trump recently urged other countries to leave the ICC, calling it “evil” and “a rogue institution,” amid an escalating US campaign against the court. The Trump administration says the ICC oversteps its authority by claiming jurisdiction over…

ANZ Group Holdings Ltd. will part ways with KPMG Australia as its longtime external auditor, adding pressure on the accounting giant that has been grappling with the fallout from allegations it improperly used confidential client information to win business. The Melbourne-based bank “will commence a competitive tender process,” to replace KPMG as its external auditor, the lender said in a statement on Friday. ANZ has used KPMG’s external audit service since 1969 and “this length is no longer considered appropriate and has been under consideration by the Board for some time,” according to the statement. The move marks another large…

This article is part of a sponsored series by Fulcrum. Client service in insurance gets talked about primarily in terms of relationships. The producer who knows the client’s business. The account manager who picks up the phone. The team that goes the extra mile when something goes wrong. Those things matter, and I have seen them make a real difference over the course of a long career in brokerage operations. What gets discussed less often is the operational infrastructure that makes consistent client service possible in the first place. Relationships carry a lot, but they carry more when the underlying…