A Kansas banker who looted millions of his small town bank in 2023, which triggered his collapse, lost much of the money to the ultretería crypto scammers attacked in a bust of the delicatessen record, according to a complaint filed on Wednesday.
Prosecutors have submitted a civil confiscation aimed at more than $ 225 million in USDT washed, part of a carnage scam with links with a call center in the Philippines that caught Shan Hanes, the former dishonorous CEO that embraced $ 47 million of Heartland Tri-State Bank, a robbery that was attributed directly to the agricultural continued in 2023.
According to the complaint of the Department of Justice, OKX, an exchange of cryptography, provided key information that helped identify an intricate network of accounts in the exchange used to wash the income of cryptography.
The scammers washed funds when ordering the victims to send USDT to 93 deposit addresses controlled by scams. From there, the funds were enrupted up to 100 intermediate wallets in a process designed to obscure the source of multi -victims mixture and deposits, according to the complaint.
These washed funds were channeled in 22 primary OKX accounts and were considered even more in 122 additional OKX accounts, all linked by shared IP addresses, reused KYC documents and a coordinated behavior supposedly brought to a Manila -based fraud compound, which the complaint names Itechno Specialist Inc. Inc.
In total, the Department of Justice says that this washing network generated approximately $ 3 billion in the volume of transactions.
Bigger victims
In total, the Department of Justice says that there were 434 victims and has identified 60 of them who lost $ 19.4 million combined.
The greatest of these victims was Hanes, with the Department of Justice identifying $ 3.3 million of the $ 47 million that he embezzled in this seizure.
Hanes embezzled the money between May 30, 2023 and July 7, 2023, according to the complaint of the Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve report on the collapse of the Tri-State Bank of Heartland, one of the banks that collapse after the banking crisis of the United States 2023.
During this period of six weeks, Hanes began 10 wire transfers for a total of approximately $ 47.1 million of the Heartland Tri-Fast Bank, a small community lender focused on agricultural loans, to a cryptographic wallet he controlled.
These bank transfers occurred among the periods of quarterly regulatory reports of the bank, which allows the activity to initially leave without detecting.
At that time, Heartland was well capitalized with $ 13.7 million in capital and $ 139 million in assets, but Hanes’s shares exhausted their liquidity, caused $ 21 million in emergency loans and left the bank with a capital hole of $ 35 million, forcing regulators to close it in July 2023.
According to previous CNBC reports, Hanes also stole $ 40,000 from the Church of Christ Elkhart, $ 10,000 of the Santa Fe Investment Club, $ 60,000 of his daughter’s College fund, and liquidated almost $ 1 million in shares of a company called Elkhart Financial to send Pig Butchering Scammers.
He was sentenced to 24 years in prison in August 2024.
The complaint of the Department of Justice referred to him as an author and victim.
Safe Crypto Probably go to the fed reservation
It is likely that cryptography seized by the United States government, as in this case, is intended for a reserve not established by President Donald Trump.
The Bitcoin
The reservation and reservation of other cryptocurrencies have not yet been formally established, but the Treasury Department has led an audit of government digital assets to determine what should meet.
Once established, long -term crypto holdings will probably put bitcoin seized in one background and other types of tokens in another.
The holdings in this case seem to be in significant quantities of USDT, according to the presentation. It is not clear what funds can be returned to the victims, since only a relatively small percentage of those directly harmed has been identified.
