Lego larceny, cattle scams, Real Housewives of fraud and money laundering, and the fugitive Italian gangster busted after showcasing his culinary skills on YouTube ― OCCRP’s Daily News team here, bringing you this week’s oddities in corruption and organized crime.

U.S. authorities have seized four domains that purported to be the legitimate websites of Pfizer Inc., and where criminals advertised fake vaccine information and stock options to collect personal information from visitors.

The Albanian state is increasingly being captured by a corrupt nexus of public officials, private sector actors and members of the judiciary in order to exploit public assets for private gain, concludes a report published on Wednesday.

Hungarian authorities said they dismantled an organized crime group believed to have deprived the Hungarian budget of more than 8.2 million euros (cca. US$9.6 million) in unpaid taxes using a sophisticated and intricate value-added tax fraud mechanism known as ‘carousel fraud.'

A Colombian court found a former member of a guerilla group guilty of participating in the kidnapping and the murder of a journalist crew and sent him behind bars for nearly 29 years, the country’s Prosecution Office announced on Tuesday.

With the help of Europol, the Spanish National Police arrested last week three people accused of collecting donations for Syrian orphans that was then spent on radicalizing and training children to become Al Qaeda jihadist fighters.

The World Bank has blacklisted an anonymously-owned Scottish company for engaging in “fraudulent practices” to win deals under an emergency medical aid programme in Uzbekistan.  

A species of African elephant has become critically endangered species due to poaching and loss of habitat, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced last week, noting that in some parts of the continent anti-poaching measures have produced results.

Global fashion brands have been yet again pressed to avoid cotton from Turkmenistan after a new investigation emerged last week revealing how last year’s harvest was once more mired in forced labour, corruption and persecution of activists, Ecotextile News reported.

Another German politician joined the list of suspects in a corruption scandal involving the procurement of COVID-19 face masks that has rocked the country’s conservatives and prompted the Bundestag to introduce a lobby register.