Abandoned luxury hotel in Florida will reopen after 17 years

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A New Jersey mom was hurt after a kid riding a motorized, plush animal at the giant East Rutherford, NJ, shopping complex barreled into her while she held her 2-year-old daughter, reports said.

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Credit is due to indicted New York Mayor Eric Adams. His recent predecessors took multiple terms to become enmeshed in scandal. Adams was elected in November 2021; less than three years later, federal prosecutors have hit him with five felony counts.In a document that was unsealed Thursday, the government accuses Adams of ripping off the city’s campaign-finance system in a not particularly ingenious fashion and of cadging free luxury-hotel rooms overseas and airline upgrades from people who may have been agents of the Turkish government. This is a sad step down from the classical municipal scandal, entailing mayors conspiring or looking the other way as contracts are fixed or commissioners bribed or political parties corrupted in clever and devious ways. No such criminal arts are entailed here.[Michael Powell: How it all went wrong for Eric Adams]Instead, the pages of Adams’s indictment are full of low comedy. In November, FBI agents waved aside the mayor’s security team, stepped with Adams into his SUV, and took away his cellphones and a laptop. But the mayor’s personal cellphone was missing. As this was the phone that Adams used to communicate with aides about his travel and fundraising, FBI agents demanded to see it.The mayor produced the phone for the FBI the next day, but, according to the indictment, there was a problem: It was locked. Adams told the agents that he had recently changed its password and, alas, had forgotten the new code.Years ago, a friend of mine reported on former Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Sharpe James, a powerful machine boss who was convicted of fraud. After the Adams indictment became public, my friend sniffed that the ham-handed derelictions attributed to the New York mayor made James look like Enrico Fermi, the nuclear physicist.In November, federal prosecutors and investigators also sat down with an Adams staffer who acted as the mayor’s liaison to Turkish Airlines. The agents made clear that they knew the mayor and the aide—who is unnamed in the indictment but has been identified in news reports as Rana Abbasova—used an encrypted messaging app to communicate with Turkish officials about travel and fundraising. The aide, the indictment stated, excused herself to use the bathroom, where she deleted the messaging app. [Read: Don’t assume that Eric Adams is going anywhere]The most damning accusations against Adams center on his supposedly taking money from foreign businesspeople, which is illegal, and using that money to obtain matching funds from the city’s campaign-finance system, which is also illegal. Far more amusing is what the government portrays as a nearly decade-long insistence on obtaining tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of free business-class upgrades on Turkish Airlines—most of which Adams failed to report. It comes off like a frequent-flier-club obsession run mad.The indictment indicates that no matter where in the world Adams flew—Ghana, France, China, Oman—he instructed aides to route flights through Istanbul, the better to get perks from Turkish Airlines and luxury-hotel stays subsidized by Turkish interests. So in 2016, Adams and his girlfriend flew to India, purchasing economy tickets for $2,286. Turkish Airlines promptly upgraded them to business class, where two tickets would have cost about $15,000.On one trip, Adams’s girlfriend texted him and was surprised to discover that he was in Istanbul, because their planned vacation was in France. According to the government, he texted back: “Transferring here. You know first stop is always instanbul.”This pattern reached an apogee when Adams’s girlfriend asked him if the two of them could visit Easter Island, in the far reaches of the South Pacific. Adams was game, the government asserts, but only if they could fly on Turkish Airlines. Disappointment loomed. As the indictment noted, he asked her to check with the airline “to confirm they did not have routes between New York and Chile.”Adams apparently was not oblivious to the risks he was running, and he seems to have resorted to a sleight of hand that in the reading sounds half-hearted. He took trips on Turkish Airlines in the summer of 2017, according to prosecutors, and three months later sent an email to his scheduler telling her that he had left the cash for those flights in an envelope in her desk. “He did not do that,” the indictment asserts.Such inept subterfuge appeared to offend the crime-hunting sensibilities of U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. “That’s just a clumsy cover-up,” Williams—who has prosecuted corrupt financiers and the music mogul Sean Combs, not to mention the occasional mafioso—told reporters.For all its absurdity, Adams’s alleged behavior, which prosecutors say began after he became Brooklyn borough president in 2014, was no small matter. The indictment noted that Adams’s Turkish contacts were working with the Turkish government, and all were intent on buying influence with an up-and-coming politician. He might, one of the Turks speculated, even become president.As Adams neared the mayoralty, the Turks began to call in their chits, the indictment suggests. In September 2021, after Adams had won the Democratic mayoral primary, a Turkish official said it was Adams’s “turn” to repay Turkey. When an aide relayed the message, Adams replied: “I know.” A Turkish consulate was due to open in a new 36-story office tower in Manhattan, and city fire inspectors had found many problems and would not sign off. Embarrassment loomed for Turkish officials.[Read: An era of shamelessness in American politics]Adams, the indictment stated, put pressure on the fire department. The chief of the department in turn told his subordinates that their jobs were at stake; if they hoped to keep their positions in Adams’s upcoming administration, the office tower must open.Not long after, prosecutors say, a Turkish Airlines manager sought a prime seat on one of Adams’s mayoral transition committees. He warned that if this did not happen, the mayor might find himself sleeping in economy class on his next trip. “Seat number 52 is empty,” the airline official noted. He was promptly appointed to a transition committee.The ridiculous mixed with the pernicious. What’s remarkable was the lack of discretion among people in Adams’s circle, even as they realized that investigators were rummaging about. In June 2021, an aide—apparently Abbasova—was recorded talking with Adams’s contact at Turkish Airlines.“How much does he owe?” the aide asked.“It is very expensive,” the airline manager replied. “I am working on a discount.” A short time later, the airline manager said he would charge the mayor $50. That answer, apparently too low, annoyed the mayoral aide: “$50? What? Quote a proper price.”“His every step is being watched right now,” the Adams aide warned the airline manager. The aide suggested “$1,000 or so,” adding, “Let it be somewhat real.” In the end, Adams paid $2,200 for two round-trip tickets to Istanbul—which, according to prosecutors, were upgraded to business-class tickets worth $15,000.Long before the FBI took his phones, Adams was struggling to gain any traction as mayor. Recent months have been particularly unkind. FBI agents have raided the homes of his police commissioner and schools chancellor and a deputy mayor. Yesterday, his chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, returned from vacation in Japan to find two law-enforcement agencies waiting for her at the airport. New resignations come every week, and this mayor’s power seems more and more like an hourglass nearly run out of sand. For the Adams administration, “Let it be somewhat real” would make a fitting epitaph.

"When it comes to misinformation, there’s only one thing we can know for certain: that nothing’s certain," writes Bryan VanDyke.

Venmo is good for sending money to friends, but it’s not necessarily the safest place to do your banking. | Vivien Killilea/Getty Images Some people collect coins or stamps. For a time, I collected debit cards. Not stolen ones! Each one of them had my name on them, right below the logo of the latest banking app I’d decided to try out: Venmo, Cash App, Chime, Varo, Current, Acorns.  For the better part of a decade, I did all my banking through these apps, enjoying their slick user experience and lack of fees. The problem with every one of them, however, is that they’re not chartered banks. If the company behind the app went bankrupt, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) would not necessarily come to my rescue. This disaster scenario was a hypothetical worry when I eventually settled for Chase and its FDIC insurance. For millions of others, it became a reality earlier this year when a company called Synapse collapsed and froze them out of their accounts. Users of Yotta, a popular savings app with a built-in lottery, and other apps that relied on Synapse to help manage their accounts couldn’t access their money for months. Now, as hundreds of thousands of Synapse customers’ dollars remain in limbo, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) are calling for banking reforms, and the FDIC is proposing changes to its rules. Still, a growing number of people are embracing these financial technology, or fintech, services. More than a third of Gen Z and millennials used a fintech app or a digital bank as their primary checking account, according to a 2023 Cornerstone Advisors study.  So some questions are worth asking: Is it a bad idea to use an app like Venmo as your main bank? Are digital banks like Chime trustworthy enough? The answer to both questions is yes. Venmo is not a bank, and using it as your primary checking account comes with some risks. Some fintech companies, like Chime, are just as big as traditional banks and offer some nice perks. Again, because they’re nontraditional, there are risks. “You’re not going to go back to a world where everybody works with a small bank and walks into a branch,” Shamir Karkal, co-founder of Simple, one of the first digital banks. “The future is just going to be more fintech, and I think we all just need to get better at it.” To get better at all of this, it helps to know what’s going on behind the scenes. Neobanks and money transmitters, briefly explained The term fintech can refer to a lot of things, but when you’re talking about everyday services for everyday people, it typically refers to either neobanks or money transmitters. Chime is a neobank. Venmo is a money transmitter. They’re regulated in different ways, but because most of these companies issue debit cards, many people treat them like checking accounts. Fintech apps are not the same thing as FDIC-insured banks.  Neobanks are fintech companies that offer services like checking accounts in partnership with chartered banks, which are FDIC-insured. Neobanks sometimes enlist intermediaries known as banking-as-a-service, or BaaS, companies, which are not FDIC-insured. Still, you will often see the FDIC logo on neobank websites, just like you see it stuck to the glass doors of many brick-and-mortar banks. That logo instills trust, and thanks to their partnerships, neobanks can claim some FDIC protections. But because they do not have bank charters, these neobanks and BaaS companies are not directly FDIC-insured. Instead, neobank customers can be eligible for something called pass-through deposit insurance coverage. Three things to know Listen to Vox’s Adam Clark Estes break down the potential pitfalls of keeping your money in a fintech app, like Venmo or Chime. @vox Venmo or Chime aren’t as safe as you think they are. Here’s what to know. ♬ original sound – Vox – Vox Pass-through insurance is a simple concept that’s deceivingly complex in practice. Essentially, if you deposit money into an account with a neobank, like Chime, the funds get routed to a chartered bank, sometimes through one of those BaaS intermediaries. If the chartered bank fails, no problem: FDIC insurance kicks in, and you can recoup up to $250,000 of your deposits. If the intermediary fails or the neobank itself fails, you might be eligible for pass-through insurance — but you might not. In its explainer about when or if you’ll get your money back in these kinds of situations, the FDIC literally says, “It depends.” “American consumers see the FDIC logo, and they interpret that as meaning: My money is safe and I will get it back,” said Jason Mikula, who runs the popular Fintech Business Weekly newsletter. “That’s just not what FDIC does exactly.” Money transmitters, also known as money services businesses, are even further removed from the perceived safety of the FDIC. Put bluntly, if you’re keeping all your money in a Venmo or Cash App account, you don’t qualify for FDIC insurance. Money transmitters are not neobanks or banks at all but rather completely different legal entities that are regulated by individual states as well as the Department of the Treasury. There are certain protections provided by these agencies, but FDIC insurance is not one of them. So when an app like Yotta or Chime says on its website that it’s FDIC insured, it’s not a lie, but it’s not necessarily true either.  Venmo, to its credit, admits in the fine print of its homepage that its parent company PayPal “is not a bank” and “is not FDIC insured.” To confuse you even more, however, certain PayPal services that enlist a chartered bank partner, like a PayPal Mastercard or savings account, might qualify for FDIC insurance. Again, it depends. The perils and perks of banking with an app Fintech companies take careful steps to make banking with them feel safe. They include the FDIC logo on the website to provide customers with some peace of mind, even though the fine print on those protections is more complicated. They issue debit cards with the Visa or Mastercard logo to suggest that these cards play by the same rules as any big bank’s debit card. These logos can act as a stamp of approval, an assurance that your money is in good hands. This is actually the heart of the problem, as far as Sen. Elizabeth Warren is concerned. This month, she and Sen. Van Hollen asked regulators to ban neobanks and fintech companies from using the FDIC name and logo if they were only offering pass-through insurance. They also called for greater supervision of these companies under the Bank Service Company Act. “The average consumer shouldn’t be expected to understand the intricacies of FDIC insurance in order to comfortably and safely save or invest their money,” Warren’s letter says. “Consumers must feel confident that they are dealing with a regulated and insured entity when they see the FDIC logo.” That doesn’t necessarily mean that all neobanks and fintech companies are untrustworthy. In some cases, the sheer size and track record of fintech companies can instill quite a bit of trust. Chime, the largest digital bank with roughly 22 million customers, scored a $25 billion valuation in its latest round of funding and is planning to go public next year. Venmo’s parent company, PayPal, is widely considered safe and trustworthy. And don’t expect Block, the $42 billion company that owns Cash App as well as its own chartered bank, to fail any time soon. The truth is, even if there is some false sense of security, fintech apps offer certain customers features that big banks can’t or won’t. One thing that’s made Chime and many other neobanks so popular, for instance, is that they don’t charge so many fees. That’s a huge boon to young people as well as people without bank accounts. If a fintech app is your only option, then you might not care so much about FDIC insurance. “If you’re poor in America and you’re banking at Chase or Wells Fargo, you’re going to get overdraft fees, minimum balance fees,” Mikula explained. “So there is a real need that [fintech] companies fulfill as a result of your establishment banks essentially not wanting to bank poor people because it’s difficult to do profitably.”  As many as 6 percent of Americans were living without a bank account in 2023, according to Federal Reserve data. That share grows to 23 percent for those making less than $23,000 a year. The unbanked population, which disproportionately comprises Black, Hispanic, and undocumented people, is at a greater risk of falling victim to predatory lending practices, including payday loans. Some fintech companies also offer short-term loans, though they’ve been criticized for being predatory as well.  Fraud alert Payment apps like Venmo are popular with scammers. Using a Venmo-branded debit card comes with some purchase protection. If you happen to fall for a scam, however, there’s a good chance the app will not pay you back. Venmo, Cash App, and Zelle are all clear about issuing refunds for payments to other individuals: They don’t do it. Or at least they can’t guarantee it. You should treat these peer-to-peer payments like cash.  Here are some tips for spotting and avoiding scams on Venmo, Cash App, and Zelle. But if you’re more of a motivated-by-fear person, read this story about a guy who wanted a deal on a swimming pool and got “a $31,000 lesson in the downside of payment apps” instead. Still, fintech companies offer the unbanked the ability to save money and build credit. For someone who can’t open a traditional bank account, Venmo can be a lifeline, since they can add funds to their Venmo balance and then pay bills using their Venmo debit card without needing a traditional checking account. If they have access to a smartphone, getting basic banking services is simple these days. As I learned firsthand when testing out many of these services over the years, it’s very easy to sign up for and easy to deposit money into a fintech app. If you have a problem, however, help can be hard to find. Many fintech companies and neobanks, including Chime, lack brick-and-mortar locations, which means you can’t walk into a branch to get an issue resolved. In fact, poor customer service is a common complaint for these companies.  That means you should always research a company before giving money to it. Read the reviews and study the fine print. Obvious red flags include hidden fee structures and reports of customers not being able to withdraw their money. You should also consider trying services out with small sums rather than your life savings. And, as always, watch out for scams and frauds. What is true in the real world is even more true in the app world: Beware of deals that look too good to be true. Only gamble with what you’d be willing to lose. A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

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