Investigations
In December 2016, the Brazilian construction conglomerate Odebrecht admitted, under oath, to something no company had ever formally confessed to before: it had operated an internal department whose sole function was paying bribes. The unit had a name — the Division of Structured Operations — an org chart, a dedicated budget, encrypted
Investigations
In March 2021, researchers examining the iPhone of a Saudi activist found a file disguised as a GIF sitting in the device's iMessage data. It was not a GIF. It was a PDF containing a compressed image format called JBIG2, engineered so precisely that the individual pixels of
Investigations
In January 2020, Kashmir Hill of The New York Times published a story about a company almost no one had heard of: a small startup called Clearview AI that had built a facial recognition app capable of identifying a stranger from a single photo, then surfacing every other picture of
Investigations
On July 29, 2017, an Equifax security engineer updated a network-monitoring certificate that had been allowed to expire ten months earlier, sat unnoticed for 19 months, and immediately watched suspicious traffic pouring out of a consumer-dispute database. The company would spend the next 40 days deciding when, and
Investigations
In August 2026, a developer's Bluetooth headphones started misbehaving. They wouldn't switch cleanly between his laptop and his phone anymore — the multipoint pairing that's supposed to be seamless kept glitching, and only when he had an AliExpress tab open. Most people would have blamed
Investigations
Regulators fined the banks behind the Libor scandal more than $9 billion combined. The one trader who went to prison for it just had his conviction overturned a decade later — and is now suing his old employer for $400 million.
Investigations
Hooker Chemical buried 21,000 tons of waste, capped it, and sold it for a dollar with a deed that predicted exactly what would happen next. It took a leaked study and a five-hour hostage standoff to get anyone to act.
Investigations
Nick Leeson was both Barings' head trader and head of settlements in Singapore, checking his own work by design. The Bank of England's own inquiry called it a total failure of controls.
Investigations
Toshiba's own internal targets, called 'challenges,' were impossible to hit honestly. An independent panel found three consecutive CEOs knew. Eight years later, the company delisted itself entirely.
Investigations
It took thirteen years, a dismissed indictment, a vacated murder conviction, and two retrials to convict the men who opened fire in Nisour Square. It took one afternoon in 2020 to undo it.
Investigations
A Swiss judge told Nestlé in 1976 to change how it marketed formula to mothers without clean water. A 2024 lab report found its baby cereal still has sugar removed for Switzerland and left in for everyone else.
Investigations
In mid-August 2026, letters started arriving at the corporate communications departments of roughly 90 German companies — Aldi Süd, Edeka, dm, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Rewe, Booking among them. The sender was Campact, a left-leaning campaign group best known for online petitions, and the letters came with an attachment: