Good morning. One of the biggest platforms that promised to give small investors access to major real-estate projects missed red flags and funneled cash into firms that fabricated their past. Now it is facing deals gone bust where $63 million of customer cash has gone missing.

CrowdStreet raised $4 billion for property developers by touting big returns, but many deals fell short, according to a new report by The Wall Street Journal.

• Bad results: The deals that went bust involved a real-estate developer called Nightingale Properties, which raised money to buy office buildings in Atlanta and Miami. In a bankruptcy filing this month, the newly named chief restructuring officer of the projects alleged that the buildings were never purchased and all but $127,000 of the investor money was transferred to other accounts, including some belonging to Nightingale’s chief executive officer.
   
• Warning signs: CrowdStreet promoted the Nightingale offerings despite several potential red flags. The developer omitted results from two bad deals from the track record shown to investors. An arbitration clause in the deals’ operating agreements stipulated that disputes would be settled by a rabbinical court.

California opens privacy probe into who controls, shares the data your car is collecting.

California’s new privacy regulator said Monday it is embarking on its first-ever enforcement action: a review of the privacy practices of connected automobiles.

The California Privacy Protection Agency—created under a ballot initiative in 2020 and the only regulator in the nation solely dedicated to privacy issues—will examine the growing amalgamation of data collected by smart vehicles and whether the business practices of the companies collecting that data comply with state law.

Since Lina Khan became Federal Trade Commission chair in 2021, she’s taken on Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, and that’s made her a lightning rod for controversy. The WSJ video team breaks down the battles she’s picked and why she’s willing to lose.

China’s tech distress grows as U.S. chip sanctions bite.

China’s tech sector is showing the strain from last year’s sweeping U.S. export restrictions, which seek to stall Beijing’s ambitions in cutting-edge industries such as artificial intelligence and supercomputing.

Semiconductor imports to China are falling. Chinese companies say they are struggling to get key components and machinery. And chipsets that have been remodeled to make them less powerful so they fall within U.S. rules are now threatened by the possibility of additional restrictions.

Banks lean on ‘hot’ deposits to shore up balance sheets.

Midsize and small banks in the second quarter largely stabilized or even reversed the deposit exodus they suffered earlier this year. To do so, many had to rely on deposits that flowed through third-party brokers.

Brokered deposits are a quick and easy way banks can bolster their balance sheets in a pinch. A bank can go to a firm such as Morgan Stanley or Fidelity to find people to invest in its certificates of deposit, often for large amounts.

But brokered deposits are typically much more expensive for banks. They can come with interest rates of 5% or more, putting pressure on profit margins.

At the U.S. Attorney’s Office, McGovern supervised an investigation into soccer governing body FIFA. He joins the firm from Hogan Lovells.

• A judge on Monday rejected Donald Trump’s effort to halt the criminal investigation he faces in Georgia, saying the former president’s allegations of prosecutorial misconduct are meritless.
   
• Arizona-based First Solar could be one of the largest beneficiaries of the U.S.’s green-energy push. The company expects to receive as much as $710 million in subsidies this year.
   
• The potential use of artificial intelligence in TV and movies has become a hot-button issue in the biggest Hollywood labor strike in 60 years.
   
• China’s economy is either slogging through a normal postpandemic soft patch or on the brink of something much worse: a damaging bout of deflation and a double-dip downturn.
   
• The FBI’s access to a controversial intelligence trove of intercepted emails, texts, and other electronic data should be curtailed, a White House panel of intelligence advisers has concluded.
   
• Coup leaders in Niger on Monday arrested several ministers and senior members of the party of detained President Mohamed Bazoum.

Follow us on X at @WSJRisk. Follow Risk & Compliance editor David Smagalla @DSmagalla_DJ and reporters Mengqi Sun @_MengqiSun, Dylan Tokar @dgtokar and Richard Vanderford @VanderfordRich.

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