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Federal prosecutors have disrupted a so-called pig-butchering scheme that cost victims more than $80 million, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday.

Four men have been indicted and two arrests have been made in one of the most sweeping enforcement actions yet on a type of scam that costs U.S. citizens hundreds of millions every year.

Lu Zhang, Justin Walker and Joseph Wong, all California residents, allegedly conspired with Illinois resident Hailong Zhu to launder the illicit proceeds of their scam, according to prosecutors. Zhang and Walker were arrested and appeared in Los Angeles federal court Wednesday.

Pig butchering, from the Chinese phrase sha zhu pan, is an increasingly widespread scam that involves cold-messaging victims and attempting to build a rapport with them. After developing a bond, scammers convince victims to send significant sums of money to fake investment platforms, supposedly to teach the victims how to make massive profits trading crypto or other assets.

The exchanges are fraudulent, and the gains are falsified. Eventually, the scammers pick up shop and flee, sometimes with millions of dollars in profits.

The defendants allegedly used shell companies registered in California to funnel their profits to domestic and international bank accounts, according to the complaint. The conspirators set up accounts at numerous banks, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, and had victims send transfers to those accounts, prosecutors alleged.

From there, the money would move to domestic accounts in their own names, to international accounts in Hong Kong or a Bahamas bank linked to money laundering and a well-known U.S. dollar stablecoin, Tether.

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Spotify says it paid nearly 1,500 artists $1 million or more in royalties for 2024 streams

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Spotify says it paid nearly 1,500 artists  million or more in royalties for 2024 streams

In this photo illustration, the Spotify music app is seen on a phone on June 04, 2024 in New York City.

Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images

Spotify is minting music millionaires.

Nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify in 2024, the company said Wednesday in its annual Loud and Clear Report.

Spotify said more than 80% of the artists in that pool didn’t have a song reach the app’s Global Daily Top 50 chart.

“Spotify has helped level the playing field for artists at every stage of their careers,” read a portion of the report. “Success in the streaming era doesn’t require a decade-spanning catalog nor a chart-topping hit.”

The news comes about a month after the company reported a fourth-quarter earnings beat that saw the Swedish music streamer record its first full year of profitability. The company said it paid an all-time high of $10 billion in royalties to the music industry for the year.

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Salesforce pledges to invest $1 billion in Singapore over five years in AI push

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Salesforce pledges to invest  billion in Singapore over five years in AI push

Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO of Salesforce, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 22nd, 2025.

Gerry Miller | CNBC

Salesforce on Wednesday announced plans to invest $1 billion in Singapore over the next five years.

The cloud software giant said the investment is designed to accelerate the country’s digital transformation and the adoption of Salesforce’s flagship AI offering Agentforce.

Salesforce is among the many technology companies hoping to boost revenue with generative AI features.

The company launched the newest version of Agentforce last month. It has previously described the system — which it says can tackle sophisticated questions in Salesforce’s Slack communications app, based on all available data — as the first digital AI platform for enterprises.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is scheduled to speak at CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE at around 9:25 a.m. Singapore time (9:25 p.m. ET) on Wednesday.

“We are in an incredible new era of digital labor where every business will be transformed by autonomous agents that augment the work of humans, revolutionizing productivity and enabling every company to scale without limits,” Benioff said in a statement.

“Singapore is at the forefront of this shift, and as the world’s largest provider of digital labor through our Agentforce platform,” he added.

Salesforce said Agentforce can help Singapore to “rapidly expand” its labor force in several key service and public sector roles at a time when the country is grappling with an aging population and declining birth rates.

Jermaine Loy, managing director of the Singapore Economic Development Board, welcomed Salesforce’s investment, saying it will help to boost the country’s efforts “to build a vibrant hub for AI innovation.”

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

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Reddit rallies after three-day slump as analyst calls sell-off ‘excessive’

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Reddit rallies after three-day slump as analyst calls sell-off 'excessive'

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman stands on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) after ringing a bell on the floor setting the share price at $47 in its initial public offering (IPO) on March 21, 2024 in New York City.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Reddit shares rose more than 10% on Tuesday, reversing a three-day slump that coincided with a broader decline among technology companies.

Despite Tuesday’s gains, Reddit shares are still roughly 30% below the close on Wednesday.

Reddit’s stock market upswing was likely bolstered by a Loop Capital analyst note published Tuesday that reiterated a buy rating and characterized the company’s shares as “extremely attractive.” The analyst note said that Reddit’s 50% drop on Wall Street in the past month “is excessive,” and that the social media company “has the biggest upside potential relative to Street estimates in our coverage universe.”

The company’s shares dropped more than 15% in February after the company reported weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter user numbers as a result of a Google search change that temporarily hurt its search-derived traffic. Although Reddit said at the time that it had recovered from the algorithmic shift, the user number miss spooked investors.

Reddit’s shares have since spiraled downward along with other tech companies like Apple, Nvidia and Tesla off of concerns related to President Donald Trump‘s tariffs and growing fears of a recession. The seven most valuable tech companies lost more than $750 billion in market value on Monday with Nasdaq experiencing its biggest decline since 2022.

Loop Capital managing director Alan Gould acknowledged in the note that investors are operating in a “risk-off market environment,” but he contended that Reddit “has been one of the top performing stocks over the past year,” aside from its most recent dip.

“RDDT wildly exceeded ours and Street estimates for 2024, which explains why the stock increased almost 7-fold from a $34 IPO price to a peak of $230 in less than a year,” Gould wrote, noting Reddit’s growing revenue and improved advertising tools, among other positive developments.

Reddit’s fourth-quarter sales grew 71% year over year to $428 million, which represents the fastest growth rate for any quarter since 2022.

“In our view, RDDT deserves the revaluation it had experiencing based on the growth it has shown in the recent earnings reports and future projected growth driven by the ability to narrow the ARPU gap, and data licensing possibilities,” Gould wrote.

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