This wasn't a sophisticated attack - Pig Butchering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam.
The scammers promised him outrageous returns, and he kept giving them more and more money - without ever actually seeing any real returns.
One has to wonder how this bank ever managed to be successful before.
With all the fraud and scams in the world - how did no one find this guy sooner?
The profiles of scam victims aren’t always what you expect. A lot of otherwise successful people reached their positions through networking, trust, and risky bets that advanced their careers.
A lot of businesses operate on trust networks at some level. The difference is that successful operators in this space will only place calculated bets and will rapidly update their level of trust when someone fails to follow through. This person apparently didn’t learn that lesson.
There is also a tendency to keep digging once a victim is deep in the hole. They know their job is already lost if they stop now, but just maybe there’s a chance that a little more digging will reveal a turnaround that covers up their past mistake. Scammers exploit this to encourage incrementally more digging into an already deep hole.
> networking
reminds me of a time I went to an event on meetup, I think I made a new friend so we meet up later together at a coffee shop he starts asking me what I know about marketing... I'm like no way... is this (makes a pyramid shape with my hands) guy stops talking
Why I've not been scammed. Why I'm not successful.
But seriously though. Compounding variance is a crazy upshot if you're lucky.
A good saying I heard a while ago was “you don’t get scammed because you’re stupid, you get scammed because you’re human”.
These scammers aren’t random individuals, they’re business that invest a lot of time and energy into working out how to scam people. They’re professionals targeting amateurs.
Yeah, not that I think I'm all that exceptional, but I've realized that truly astronomically successful people are separated from me as much by risk tolerance and a frankly short-sighted-seeming commitment to a single goal as by talent or skill. Survivorship bias sometimes makes me wish I was willing to risk it all on a bad bet too, but a sober look at the typical result of that approach makes me glad I'm not.
Charles Lindbergh was good enough- and lucky enough- to be the first person to fly New York to Paris and became the most famous man in the world when he won the Orteig Prize. Six other people weren't quite good or lucky enough, and died pursuing the Ortieg Prize. If you look it up on Wikipedia you can find their names, but I can only name one of them off the top of my head (Charles Nungasser was a famous French WWI ace), and I suspect that one makes me better than 99% of the people alive today at remembering these men.
Everyone would like to be Charles Lindbergh, but far more common to be Charles Clavier or Noel Davis, failing, dying, and forgotten.
More importantly, for every Charles Lindbergh, there are a hundred to a million people with just as much skill, talent, charisma, whatever, who just had slightly worse luck in some aspect.
For that reason, we shouldn't over-index our society around the Charles Lindberghs.
Bonus points: You are less likely to empower literal nazis.
>A lot of businesses operate on trust networks at some level.
100% this. No one is immune. Not even "savvy tech people;" Theranos and FTX were similar affinity frauds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud) commited against Silicon Valley old-money and VC circles, respectively.
To be clear: no biotech VC ever invested in Theranos. The people who are actually “savvy” in that industry (everyone) stayed clear because even cursory due diligence revealed the core problem with the science.
That’s what separates competent people from rubes and tech VCs. A bit of due diligence.
+1. It is also possible for tech savvy people to fall for regular scams (automated text in the middle of the night from your bank etc..).
It is 2025 - still banks can't do everything through their apps. To Fintech: Stop SMS based OTP , have better apps. You no longer have the excuse that you can't hire engineers.
A lot of this rings true for me. Myself and maybe 40 other individuals all participated in what now in retrospect was an obvious Ponzi scheme - see SEC vs. Shavers (0)
I even have IRC transcripts to this day where I would ask the dude “this isn’t a scam right?” and I would be reassured until the next day and I’d think about it more, ask more questions and then deposit more damn monies! The greed will subvert all logic if the daily vig is high enough. Or it did to me and I learned an extremely valuable and costly lesson.
Don’t be greedy. Anything that’s too good to be true in investment terms is exactly that: too good to be true. Anyone that can pay 1% interest daily doesn’t need your money. In retrospect it’s obvious and some of the people participating back then were screaming “ponzi” while depositing more and more possibly trying to break it to prove the point. Eventually it got too big and broke.
“Break it to prove a point” would be an accurate description of your average Bitcoin dweeb in 2012-2014 or so. I spent considerable time Sybil attacking and dusting every namecoin address I could at one point. Not for any specific reason just because I could.
After the smoke cleared I punished myself for years, volunteering for things I had no business getting involved in. I hated that I allowed myself to be scammed but it was a multi-year “friendship” that developed pseudo-anonymously over IRC. I don’t make new friends on the internet anymore because I can’t verify authenticity or identity these days unless I can touch you and see you.
Back then it was $7500 I didn’t actually work to earn and I was just letting it ride for 1% interest daily, compounded. I was famously asked on IRC how much I lost and my answer was and still is “more than car, less than a house” - not an attempt to minimize it but to quantify it.
Trendon did his 18 months and if he’s reading this - Yo dawg please stop skipping out on your apartment rent and stay out of small claims court bro, seriously grow tf up.
(0) https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...
Court transcript is a wild read if you can find it. Bitcoin is possibly money today because of this case (and by extension, my actions) was filed in Texas where this guy wiped his AWS account, stonewalled both the SEC and FBI on discovery and attempted the defense “Bitcoin isn’t money, I did nothing illegal”
That defense didn’t work.
In any case the parent comment rings true:
-Escalation of trust -Pushing boundaries to find if they exist -Friend-like communication in what should be a business relationship -Trust networks and/or referrals to participate -“sold out” “sorry not accepting new customers” are the best “For Sale” advertisements -Betting bigger or digging a deeper hole
I went off script a bit here, apologies, but the comment triggered a brain dump. People get scammed for different reasons.
> without ever actually seeing any real returns.
I am sure he "saw" real returns on a very real looking app or website. As we transition to a cashless society we are all getting use to the numbers on our computers and phones representing real money.
My paystub is digital, it goes into my bank account directly and the numbers on my computer go up. I spend money by taping a computer chip onto another computer chip and then the numbers in my bank account drop. I can also digitally transfer those numbers to a brokerage account and click a few buttons and then the numbers go up and down depending on how people are feeling about the stock market. In the past few years, seemingly always up, which I think is priming young or naive investors to believe investments never fail.
> I am sure he "saw" real returns on a very real looking app or website.
Exactly: "Hanes told Mitchell a confusing story. Not long ago, Hanes explained, he started investing in cryptocurrencies with the help of some people he met online. First, he and his partners deposited money on a reputable U.S. platform for buying and selling crypto. The profits were enormous, he said: He took out his phone to show Mitchell his account balance, which seemed to indicate that the investment was worth $40 million."
And frankly, that's an entirely reasonable result for having invested in Bitcoin at any number of times, which was also by all reasonable measures a bad idea. I think even people who support the existence and value of crypto would agree that Bitcoin winners are most like stock-lottery winners than particularly savvy investors.
Crypto is great for scams even beyond it's infrastructural advantages because a lot of people made a ton of money from investing money they couldn't afford to lose in things that were pretty indistinguishable from the actual scams.
The difference between a real crypto exchange and a scam crypto exchange is that you can actually withdraw your cryptocurrency from the exchange.
This nuance lost on the common cryptocurrency speculator given that they have no idea what cryptocurrency actually is or how it's supposed to work.
There is a difference between seeing numbers go up on an app, and getting money into an actual bank that you know to be real.
The fact that you're even arguing this point shows how easy it is for people to fall for this crap.
Anyone can make a real looking app that makes it look like you're making money when they've already stolen all your money and spent it on hookers and coke on yachts.
Not anyone can start a real bank in the US, and if they can, you generally have protections in place to not need to worry the bank is that egregiously fraudulent.
I think younger investors know and understand that the market can fall, but this is still different than having lived through the market falling and how dramatic that can be.
> I think is priming young or naive investors to believe investments never fail.
Investments fail, there are plenty in the news. Broad market indices, however, don’t fail. There have been numerous bailouts over the previous decades. Why would one assume any future government wouldn’t continue bailouts if all the previous ones did?
The act of a bailout couples the credit of the rescuing organization with that of the rescued. That's literally what a bailout is: the rescuer agrees to take on some of the losses and credit risk, usually in return for agreements for future payments and power over how the business is restructured and managed. In the process, the credit and assets of the rescuing organization are damaged, and the bailed out organization is saved. Purely financial transactions never affect the actual reality on the ground, only how risks, responsibilities, and rewards are apportioned.
When the organization is as big as the U.S. government and has as good credit as the U.S. did in 2008, you can save an awful lot of financial institutions. But if it gets to the point where everybody expects to be bailed out and people start acting accordingly, you can't. Eventually the government ends up falling, as people start realizing that the economy isn't actually working and everybody is just cooking the books with financial transactions.
Government policy makers know this, and their livelihood is dependent upon the continued existence of the government, and so at some point they declare "Nope, bailout is not going to happen this time. You're on your own." At that point, the last group of people who took stupid financial risks are left holding the bag. It's very much like a pyramid scheme: the going is good as long as you can find a greater fool to assume the risk from you, but at some point there are no greater fools, and you find out the greater fool was you.
>At that point, the last group of people who took stupid financial risks are left holding the bag.
Isn’t that all the policy makers, old voters, taxpayer funded DB pension funds, etc that depend on broad market equity index fund returns?
Obviously, the system breaks down when it breaks down (when the currency has no purchasing power left to lose), but until then, the entire political apparatus is incentivized to bail out asset prices.
And if that isn’t possible, then the status of your investments/brokerage/bank accounts is going to be the least of your worries, as you will have more immediate concerns about procuring food/energy/shelter/security.
We've never had an executive whose financial policy positions include eliminating FDIC and that much of the federal deficit is fraudulent so can safely be disregarded and left unpaid. Believing in continuity at this time is a poor bet.
Governments and nations collapse. Anyone who was bullish in 235 CE Rome would have died long before their investments would be back in the black.
235 CE Rome? The Western Roman Empire lasts another two centuries- Romulus Augustus is deposed in 476 CE. That's longer than the US Constitution has existed (ratified in 1788).
In many respects the deposing of the last Western Roman Emperor is a bad date to use for the "Fall of Rome", given that the general socioeconomic trends of the time are fairly continuous for that period and contemporary sources didn't place much value on the shift of politics.
The Crisis of the Third Century, which starts in 235, is where the inflection point between "broadly stable" and "broadly negative" sets in, and the shocks both of the Crisis of the Third Century and the Plague of Justinian are each larger than the shock of the deposing of the last Western Roman Emperor.
I agree that Augustulus and Ordacer mattered to almost no one by 476, which is why it happened the way it did.
However, the point I was trying to make is that Rome's decline sure lasted a very long time indeed.
Additionally, 235 being so important is only obvious in hind-sight. To anyone living in the Empire in 235, I suspect it felt an awful lot like the Year of the Five Emperors (about as far away from 235 as Diocletian is the other direction) and it wasn't until a while later that it became clear that no Septimus Severus type was going to be able to put it all back together quickly.
> The Western Roman Empire lasts another two centuries
How long to you have to live, to see a return?
235 to 285 were tumultuous times, civil war and all that goes with it
> Broad market indices, however, don’t fail.
Famous last words
Especially when you look at how it is distributed. At least market cap weighted... Makes me really question just how high can the line go.
Like many things but unlike other things, it will go up and up and up until it goes to zero.
All economic gains that don't come from real productive activity are Ponzi schemes. Some last orders of magnitude longer than others.
It's a classic example of a long-term trust network getting breached, in this case by a trusted local that got in over their head. The bank was created to provide loans to locals, mostly farmers where everybody knew how farm loans worked and obviously did well doing that.
People don't understand that these trust networks are only as strong as the weakest link. Even with everyone having good intentions, they don't understand that people can be blackmailed, have mental health breakdowns, etc.
It's also a more poignant tale of a small, community where (thanks, Internet!) international grifters could nonetheless inject themselves.
Or, more cynically, this guy was destined to be scammed and the internet in short order put him to the test. One has to think though that if it were a local scammer we would not be talking tens of millions of dollars.
Its interesting to think about it this way. Like, this community's "financial opsec" was their isolation from the rest of the world. No one on the outside can attack them if no one can even point out the town on the map. The internet makes that approach impossible.
Yeah, it might even be worst than that. If I were a scammer I would seek out these small-town banks looking for my mark.
And while we're at it, find the business owners of the auto dealerships in any metropolitan area. These families and the ones that own the largest construction contractor companies are the lesser-known millionaires living in our midst that might have large bank accounts.
And who knew small town church coffers might have millions lying around.
Unless I missed somewhere in the article, it is possible that it wasn't a scam and he probably just leveraged his initial stake. When it fell below the margin, he needed the money to avoid the loss.
The article talks about him being persuaded by persons "met on the internet" to "invest" in "crypto". There is absolutely no scenario in which an attractive woman sends you a LinkedIn message with the intent of getting you to make legitimate - albeit leveraged - crypto investments.
>One has to wonder how this bank ever managed to be successful before.
The article touches on exactly this:
>No one in Elkhart has managed to make sense of the mystery at the center of the betrayal: Why did a successful, financially sophisticated banker, a man the whole town trusted for decades, gamble his life away for a shot at crypto riches?
Though this guy had been previously fired from the same position at the bank in 2011 for financial irregularities under his watch, so they kind of only have themselves to blame:
>But in 2011, the leaders of the Kansas Bank Corporation grew concerned about Hanes, according to Tina Call, who served on the company’s board at the time. They had discovered problems in his loan portfolio — borrowers who lacked sufficient collateral, financial paperwork that didn’t seem to add up.
>Hanes was eventually fired for reasons that remain in dispute years later.
"This Guy" is everywhere. People fall for scams all the time, and as a society, we are failing to educate them with the sense to sniff them out. That, and a regulatory environment where everything goes, means that people of all walks of life are getting suckered every day. Only a matter of time that one of those people happened to be a small local bank manager with access to millions.
If it wasn't a crypto scam, it would be a lottery scam, or a job offer scam, or romance/pigbutchering scam, or a tech support phone scam, or a meatspace MLM scam like Amway and Herbalife. There is no shortage of ways gullible, financially-illiterate people can be separated from their money.
A recent post from a crypto reporter gave a good write up of how he almost got himself scammed [1]. It sounds like it followed the exact same script, even down to the Aunt with a crypto trading firm. The lengths that the scammers went to in order to prepare him for the scam was impressive. It gives some personal insight into how even those who should know better find themselves involved.
[1] https://unchainedcrypto.com/how-i-almost-got-slaughtered-in-...
I mean the job of the scammer is not a difficult one for guys like this (and almost certainly Mr Hanes). Use a picture of an attractive woman and make them believe they're about to get their dick wet and you're 95% of the way there.
> People fall for scams all the time, and as a society, we are failing to educate them with the sense to sniff them out.
IDK. It's one thing to fall for a scam and lose all your money. It's another thing to, after all that, go to your board of directors, ask permission to invest bank money in the scam, and when they say "We don't feel comfortable with this" tell them "Too late, I already invested the company's money in this for you." This is not a financially illiterate person, but someone who seemingly knew he needed board approval for an investment at scale, yet simultaneously ignored it and assumed he would be given it when asking retroactively.
There's a great many other failures of control here, like staff disobeying policy when he told them to. And perhaps it's my family history speaking here, but I suspect this guy has an undiagnosed mental illness (bipolar?).
Have you seen The Tinder Swindler? A woman borrowed $250,000 USD from 9 separate banks to give money to a man within months of their meeting. I don't know how one gets to that place.
Agree with your points. But I think we're unlikely to see tens of millions of dollars in an Amway, Herbalife hustle.
> People fall for scams all the time, and as a society, we are failing to educate them with the sense to sniff them out.
One of the companies I work with recently started looking at partnering with this company: https://scamnetic.com/
I like the idea of providing better education about scams to consumers, but this company gives me some pretty weird vibes. I wonder if we're on the cusp of another security theater boom similar to the plethora of companies that sprung up around identity theft and mostly seemed to exist to allow companies to mitigate any responsibility for their poor data and security practices.
This exactly. And Crypto's biggest "innovation" by far was giving us an entirely new unregulated financial market with zero consumer protections that included, as a bonus, the trappings and added complexity of software and let con men the world over dust off every money scheme from the last hundred years and do a fresh round.
Edit: Further, "education" shouldn't even be a factor here. You should not need to protect yourself from being scammed. Taking advantage of people's trust and stealing their money should be illegal, the offenders should be punished, and the victims made whole. There is no reason in a civilized society to permit financial crimes, which is what this shit is. Stealing is fucking stealing, whether you take something from a store, whether a bank issues bullshit fees, whether an employer doesn't pay fair wages, whether a con man tricks you into buying ape pictures.
> You should not need to protect yourself from being scammed.
Under the current administration, you need to protect yourself far more than before.
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is gone.
- The Justice Department will focus on "violent crime", even though that's mostly the job of local law enforcement and the FBI doesn't handle 911 calls. In terms of dollars, white collar crime is far bigger than violent crime. (Burglary in the US is way down, about a fifth of what it was in 1990.)
- The administration plan is to move crypto enforcement from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Heavy payoffs by the crypto industry have enabled this. [1]
It's called "deregulation", suckers. Open season on Americans.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/technology/crypto-industr...
The difference between theft and a scam is that a scam requires participation from the victim based on a false premise, whereas theft requires no participation from the victim.
>whether a bank issues bullshit fees, whether an employer doesn't pay fair wages, whether a con man tricks you into buying ape pictures.
So basically giving someone a bad deal is therefore theft? This isn't a principled idea to hold, it is pretty much a slippery slope to call any transaction you don't like theft afterwards.
One advantage of cryptocurrency is that it prevents parties from "renegotiating" deals like this after they've made them. Fraud is pretty uncommon on say, the silk road or something for the same reason it's uncommon on ebay or craigslist: when consumers have to actively consider the trust networks they are using, the market becomes more transparent and trustworthy. When you defer to some arbitrary, opaque authority to settle transactions, that's when you get situations like this.
> So basically giving someone a bad deal is therefore theft? This isn't a principled idea to hold, it is pretty much a slippery slope to call any transaction you don't like theft afterwards.
It's not about whether or not I personally like it, it's about whether or not it has the value it's ascribed to. NFTs are murkier in that some people believe they have value, and I guess that's fair. I think it's demonstrably false, but I doubt a person who believes they have value would consider an NFT purchase fraudulent, and therefore would not pursue it.
If however a given person was suckered into buying an NFT by someone, and later realized it was worthless, I think that's absolutely something that at least bears considering in terms of it being fraud, in a court of law. I don't see how it's different from any other situation where a given individual has sold worthless assets.
> One advantage of cryptocurrency is that it prevents parties from "renegotiating" deals like this after they've made them.
One huge disadvantage is that on any cryptocurrency with any decent amount of traffic as a currency is that the value of it shifts wildly from the beginning to end of the transaction. And that can bite either party to the transaction, which is why the only currencies that see substantial use as a currency are the ones with low adoption rates. It's basically pointless to accept, for example, Etherium as payment unless you yourself are speculating on it's future value. But that's not a currency then, not in any normies' definition. A hundred dollars is worth the same today, for all intents and purposes, as it was a year ago. Plus or minus a few percent for inflation. The $4 you plunk down for a fancy coffee is not going to be worth $0.50 or $400 by the time the barista hands you the cup, otherwise no one would use money.
> When you defer to some arbitrary, opaque authority to settle transactions, that's when you get situations like this.
Cryptocurrency defers to the blockchain, and the various software that interacts with it. This is literally no difference to deferring to any other centralized institution to form trust. The only difference is the layman has no way to seek justice from a blockchain.
I think the volatility of the currency is caused by a lack of it's use in real markets, not the other way around. In practice, the volatility isn't that big of a problem on an individual level.
Yep. Much of cryptocurrency content is just "Discover Why Financial Regulations Exist" speedruns.
I wonder if something literally went wrong with this guy's head. Early onset dementia or something along those lines. And alas, the scammers discovered him before the doctors did.
The fact that a decade previously in 2011, Hanes had been found to push a bunch of questionable loans, was fired, but then a year later was back in as president shows that he probably just got greedy.