What sounded like a high-tech investment was actually an old-fashioned Ponzi scheme — one thousands of people fell for, according to the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC). The government agency is suing the man behind allegedly behind the fraud.
GAW Miners and ZenMiner, both founded by Homero Joshua Garza, promised would-be investors the chance to get in on a massive Bitcoin mining operation. The basic idea is that investors would pay for computer hardware that would then mine the virtual currency. The digital currency mined would then be given back to investors.
The problem: Very few computers were ever actually brought online to do the mining, according to an SEC press release on the matter.
“Investors were misled to believe they would share in returns earned by the Bitcoin mining activities,” says the release, “When in reality GAW Miners directed little or no computing power toward any mining activity.”
This isn’t to say no investors were paid — many thought they were getting returns from the operation. But all of that money came from later investors, making the entire operation was a pyramid scheme with a little bit of Bitcoin flavor. The SEC says most investors never got their full investment back, with only a few making any sort of profit.
It’s easy to think of this as yet another reason to avoid Bitcoin, and we’re sure media outlets will report this story as such. But at its heart, this scheme has less to do with Bitcoin and more to do with old-fashioned deception.
“As alleged in our complaint, Garza and his companies cloaked their scheme in technological sophistication and jargon, but the fraud was simple at its core: They sold what they did not own, misrepresented what they were selling, and robbed one investor to pay another,” said Paul G. Levenson, director of the SEC’s Boston regional office.
Investment, online and off, is risky — make sure you only work with people and institutions you know you can trust.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.