Personal Finance News

The Washington Post reports about phone scammer Keniel A. Thomas, who made the mistake of calling William H. Webster. Thomas told 90-year-old Webster that he had won $72 million and a new Mercedes Benz in the Mega Millions lottery, but that he needed to send $50,000 in taxes and fees to get his money. Instead of sending $50,000 to the random caller, Webster performed reverse phone sting for FBI.

Thomas’s research didn’t turn up everything. He didn’t learn that the man he was calling was the former director of the FBI and the CIA, the only person ever to hold both jobs. And he didn’t know that Webster would call him back the next day with the FBI listening in.Thomas was arrested in late 2017, after he landed in New York on a flight from Jamaica. He pleaded guilty in October and faced a prison term of 33 to 41 months under federal sentencing guidelines. But with Webster and his wife in the courtroom, Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell on Friday added another 2 years to Thomas’s sentence, giving him nearly six years to serve. Howell said that the scam qualified as “organized criminal activity” and that Thomas posed “a threat to a family member of the victim.”

According to two new studies conducted by researchers with the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, giving to others rather than to ourselves makes us happier. Study Finds explains:

Millennials, long presumed to have less interest in the nonstop consumption of goods that underpins the American economy, might not be that different after all, a new study from the Federal Reserve says. Bloomberg reports:

“Their spending habits are a lot like the generations that came before them, they just have less money at this point in their lives, the Fed study found. The group born between 1981 and 1997 has fallen behind because many of them came of age during the financial crisis. ‘We find little evidence that millennial households have tastes and preference for consumption that are lower than those of earlier generations, once the effects of age, income, and a wide range of demographic characteristics are taken into account,’ wrote authors Christopher Kurz, Geng Li and Daniel J. Vine.”

“Their findings [PDF] are grounded in an analysis of spending, income, debt, net worth, and demographic factors among different generations. The conclusion that millennials aren’t all that different also holds for the researchers’ more granular examination of expenditures on cars, food, and housing. ‘It primarily is the differences in average age and then differences in average income that explain a large and important portion of the consumption wedge between millennials and other cohorts,’ they conclude. So much for the young folks favoring ‘experiences’ over tangible goods.”