The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shared details on March 26 of how it successfully reclaimed more than $8 million that had been swindled from local investors in a Kansas bank that collapsed after a cryptocurrency scam. The funds were recovered following the downfall of Heartland Tri-State Bank in Elkhart, Kansas, where the CEO, Shan Hanes, wired more than $47 million in bank funds to scammers posing as crypto investment brokers. The FBI noted:

The bank’s failure cost them more than $8.2 million—a figure amounting to generations of accumulated wealth for farmers, teachers, and others in and around the rural town of around 2,000 people.

Those affected were not Wall Street players but small-town shareholders, many of whom had their entire net worth invested in the institution.

The FBI’s Kansas City Division launched an investigation after state regulators uncovered the fraud and shut the bank down. Hanes later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 24 years in prison—the longest federal sentence ever imposed for a white-collar crime in the state. Investigators worked across agencies, including with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to follow the trail of stolen funds.

According to the Bureau:

The division’s Complex Financial Crime Squad and Cyber Crimes Task Force quickly traced the flow of scammed funds to an offshore digital wallet, or crypto account, containing more than $8 million. The FBI seized the funds.

The scam, identified as a type of crypto fraud known as “pig butchering,” involved convincing Hanes to make increasingly larger investments in a fake platform. “The bank’s customers got their money back since the deposits were federally insured,” the FBI added, distinguishing them from the shareholders who were initially left with nothing.

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