by Ty Tagami | Jul 28, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A Georgia man has been convicted in a Louisianna federal court for his role in a scheme that involved stringing along women online then extracting millions of dollars from them.
During a four-day trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Kenneth G. Akpieyi, 44, played a key role in defrauding women by connecting them with romantic partners on Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms, the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Louisianna said Monday.
The conversations then moved to encrypted platforms, including WhatsApp, where the perpetrators asked the women to send money for fraudulent reasons, such as for charity or to help with family illnesses, prosecutors said.
Eight victims testified to total losses exceeding $3 million, prosecutors said.
Michael M. Simpson, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisianna, praised the FBI in New Orleans for their work on the case. Simpson also thanked the Cobb County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI in Atlanta.
Akpieyi, who lived in Marietta under the alias Phillip Anderson, used his company, KGA Autobrokers LLC, to obscure the movement of victims’ money, with funds reaching bank accounts in China, the United Arab Emirates and other countries, prosecutors said.
Akpieyi will be sentenced Nov. 5 and could get up to 20 years in prison for conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and 20 years for conspiracy to commit money laundering. He also faces hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 28, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has launched an investigation into a company accused of operating a Ponzi scheme that bilked investors while funding political campaigns.
The announcement follows a lawsuit filed in mid-July by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against Edwin Brant Frost IV and his company First Liberty Building and Loan.
“If you engaged with First Liberty and have not yet submitted a formal complaint with the Securities Division, you are encouraged to do so using the appropriate channels on the Secretary of State’s website,” the state agency said Monday. “Individuals who contact the office will be treated confidentially.”
The agency’s Securities Division regulates the securities industry in Georgia, including investment products.
Raffensperger has already called on politicians to return any campaign contributions from First Liberty or the Frost family, which has been active in state Republican politics.
The SEC lawsuit said Frost used investor funds for more than $570,000 in political contributions.
The Georgia Republican Party said last week that it had repaid nearly $37,000 in such income to the court-appointed receiver for First Liberty.
The company raised at least $140 million from about 300 investors, and the lawsuit said Frost also used their money to pay himself and his family at least $5 million.
Raffensperger said his agency was trying to reach First Liberty investors. In addition to asking them to file a complaint, the agency would like them to fill out an online survey to help with the “fact-finding” process.
“Your responses will be kept confidential,” the form says.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 28, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A second Republican congressman has joined the race to unseat U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff next year.
In a brief announcement on social media Monday, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, R-Jackson, joined fellow GOP Rep. Buddy Carter, R-St. Simons, in the campaign to replace Democrat Ossoff with a Republican.
Currently, both of Georgia’s Senate seats are held by Democrats, the other by Sen. Raphael Warnock, who will be up for re-election in 2028.
Collins and Carter will face off first in the Republican primary next year. Both have aligned themselves with President Donald Trump and his MAGA base of Republican voters. Last week, another Trump-aligned candidate, Georgia Insurance Commissioner John King, suspended his candidacy, saying he saw “little path forward to the nomination.”
Collins, a trucking executive, announced his entry into the race with the words “I’m in” on X. In a second post, he described himself as a “conservative workhorse” and “America First fighter,” adding, “Chip in some cash and I’ll stay on the gas!”
Collins added a video of himself driving a semi-truck. In the video, he touts Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” and banning “boys from playing girls’ sports.” And he talks of writing the Laken Riley Act, which requires federal immigration agents to arrest, detain and deport immigrants who cross the border illegally and then commit nonviolent crimes.
Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, was murdered last year while jogging on the University of Georgia campus. Both Ossoff and Warnock supported the bill, which Trump signed in January.
But Collins in his video calls them “California crazies.”
Democrats fired back, calling Collins a “MAGA extremist” aligned with Trump’s “toxic agenda, deep Medicaid cuts, and economic chaos.”
by Ty Tagami | Jul 25, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The federal government has told Georgia it will soon release the rest of the education funding it had held back from public K-12 schools.
The Georgia Department of Education said Friday that the administration of President Donald Trump will send the state tens of millions of dollars tied to federal law.
The agency won’t know the total amount until next week, but last year’s funding in these categories came to more than $154 million.
The money that the U.S. Department of Education approved for release is tied to four sections of federal law:
Title I-C is for educating migrant children, Title II-A supplements educator training, Title III-A helps educate students who are not native English speakers, and Title IV-A is a flexible grant for discretionary use.
On Thursday, the Georgia education department confirmed receipt of $40.6 million for a fifth section of federal law, Title IV-B, for afterschool programming, which had been due July 1.
The state Board of Education has scheduled a meeting Tuesday to formally accept that money and any of the additional funding if it is received by then.
The Trump administration has already released funding for other programs, such as special education and Title I-A, for “economically and educationally disadvantaged” students.
State School Superintendent Richard Woods had been publicly pressuring the federal government to send the money. He expressed gratitude Friday for the decision to release these remaining funds. The money will be coming as schools prepare for the return students of students over the next two weeks.
“To lead effectively,” Woods said, “we must have timely and reliable access to resources approved by Congress and signed into law by the president.”
by Ty Tagami | Jul 25, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Thousands of Georgians will soon be spending money from the state’s new subsidy for private K-12 education, as the first quarterly payouts appear in “promise scholarship” accounts.
More than 15,000 students applied for one of the $6,500 annual subsidies, and about 8,500 were approved. That means the state is on track to give about $55 million in taxpayer dollars — far less than budgeted — to families that have chosen private schooling over attendance at their nearby low-performing public school.
To qualify for the payments, most students had to spend a year attending one of the nearly 500 public schools performing in the bottom quarter of state academic measures. But the youngest students have a way around that requirement. Under last year’s law establishing the payments, often referred to as a “voucher,” rising kindergartners need not have attended public school to qualify.
According to new figures from the Georgia Student Finance Commission, which oversees the program, a third of the recipients will be attending kindergarten. Nearly half will be in elementary school, with the rest in seventh through 12th grades.
The money will be paid out quarterly, starting this month. Families can use it for a variety of education-related expenses. Two-thirds said they plan to spend it on tuition, according to the commission. The rest will use it to cover home schooling costs and other allowable expenses, such as tutoring, therapy and curriculum.
Opponents of these vouchers argued they would mostly be used by the wealthy, who are more able to afford the difference between the amount of the subsidy and the cost of private school tuition, which can exceed $10,000 a year.
As state Republican lawmakers were pushing Senate Bill 233 to final passage last year, Sen. Nabilah Islam Parkes, D-Duluth, summarized the opposition, mostly from fellow Democrats.
The vouchers are “a mirage for families like mine and for countless others across our state,” she said on the Senate floor, adding that they would undermine education for kids who don’t choose private school, since public schools would lose state funding for each student who took a voucher.
“It is a battle for the soul of our education system,” Parkes said.
“I’ve got news for you,” responded Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, the chief co-sponsor of the bill. “The wealthy already have school choice, including some wealthy members in this room who have been able to exercise school choice for their own children.”
Supporters of the bill, which Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law a month after passage, said the loss of state funding for public schools would not hurt them because they would no longer have to cover the cost of educating the voucher recipients.
The commission reports that three quarters of recipients are “lower-income,” meaning the students are coming from households with incomes at or below four times the federal poverty level. ($106,600 a year for a family of three and $128,600 for a family of four.)
Half of the recipients are Black and a third are white.
Two metro Atlanta districts will lose the most students — DeKalb County, with nearly 900 scholarship recipients, and Henry County, with nearly 800. Others rounding out the top five districts losing students to vouchers are Bibb County, at nearly 600 students; Richmond County at nearly 500, and Savannah-Chatham County with more than 400.
The commission cautioned that the numbers are a moving target because some students may yet opt out. But the participation numbers are well below the $141 million that lawmakers budgeted for this school year.
Tony West, Georgia director of Americans for Prosperity, a group that lobbied for this program, attributed the low participation to several potential reasons: parents haven’t heard of the program yet, they know about it but are skeptical or they did not apply because they do not live in the attendance zone of an eligible public school.
Only 56% of applicants were approved, which suggests that many who applied do not live near an underperforming school. Address and state residency were the two main qualifying criteria.
“I think that strongly suggests that the eligibility requirements are too restrictive,” said West, who noted that 16 states with similar scholarship programs have not based eligibility on address. He can see his group lobbying state lawmakers to convert Georgia’s program to universal access.
“We’ll see what the political appetite is moving forward,” he said.
