Kinda misleading or poorly written title. He was not convicted of falling for a crypto scam. He was convicted of embezzling funds from the bank, which he did while pumping them into a dumb crypto scam. It would have been illegal even if the crypto thing was NOT a scam (which is rare, I know).
even if the crypto thing was NOT a scam (which is rare, I know).
that comment had to hurt the crypto community hard
The people who still don’t know have built up a level of ignorance to miss any kind of message like that.
TBH I feel like it’s much harder for anti-crypto ideologues to admit that crypto has non-scam usages. Or to admit that fiat currency is a scam so huge that it’s literally destroying the planet.
to be fair, buying drugs or untraceable money transfers are totally a use case of crypto (basically everything that is illegal)
untraceable money transfers
Crypto is very traceable though - every transaction that has ever happened is in a public ledger!
There’s usually a transfer to or from fiat currency at some point, and there’s been several cases where Bitcoin transfers have been traced to a real person using that.
And to think, I almost felt pity for him.
Almost doing some heavy lifting there
Hanes stole tens of thousands from a local church, then a local investor club, and finally his daughter’s college fund, NBC News reported. Then when all those wells dried up, he started stealing bank funds
Wow, what a PoS
It states that he never once received anything back yet was convinced even after being arrested and sending 10s of millions of dollars into a black hole, that he only needed another month or two to earn everything back. How the fuck can someone be duped so hard?
“Many victims will never fully recoup losses to their life savings and retirement funds, but at least we at the Department of Justice can see that Hanes is held criminally responsible for his actions.”
I would hope most people would be made whole through FDIC insurance. That’s 250k per depositor, per insured bank, for each account ownership category.
He was going to pay it all back tho!!! smh.
Wild story, but many things I don’t get:
- How could a bank CEO be so stupid to fall for a financial scam like this? He must know how these work, banks are constantly fighting against scams and warning customers
- How the fuck the bank would allow the CEO to go rogue and request/make these transactions? They have board, supervisory board, risk mgmt, yet nobody stopped or noticed the fraud until his neighbor(!) told them. This institution shouldn’t be allowed to handle people’s money
- Wtf is the attorney’s sad speech about being unsure ppl getting back their savings? They were insured, they get the money back. Pay the fuck up and reimburse your clients for the bank’s mistake
This one blew me away.
According to NBC News, Hanes missed at least one opportunity to realize that he was being scammed. After he asked for a $12 million loan from a neighbor, Brian Mitchell, his neighbor detected the scam and refused to lend the money.
My limit is like $40.
Cheap bastard! Who would deny their neighbor coming over to borrow some sugar and a couple mills?
Well the house is presumably up for purchase now. I feel like I want to be this guy’s neighbor.
Hey Bob, I want to buy a luxury yacht but I only have $12.50 in the bank, can I borrow $2 million please I’ll have it back to you by Friday.
Uh, a luxury yacht costs a lot more than $2M, $2M gets you a premium fishing/speed boat.
I know, these poors don’t know anything about the struggles we face. (did you know mike just got himself a Benetti that’s 2 meters longer than mine? honestly, who does he think he is)
Damn, even with inflation? You must be super on guard. That being said. I will turn on my A game to shave $0.50 off of a set of coasters from a tourist shop while on vacation.
How could a bank CEO be so stupid
Seriously?
Because the bank was insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the FDIC “absorbed the $47.1 million loss” after "Hanes’ fraudulent actions caused HTSB to fail and the bank investors to lose $9 million.
his sentence of more than 24 years is 29 months longer than prosecutors had requested, NBC News reported.
Here, the only reason he’s seeing jail time. Not because he stole, but he stole from the rich. Tanking a bank and losing poor peoples money won’t get you anything. But lose rich peoples money, and you’re going down. There are two justice systems in america, and you don’t have access to the one that works.
Here, the only reason he’s seeing jail time. Not because he stole, but he stole from the rich.
Regardless, maybe the reality that a C-suite executive is spending a quarter century in jail might mean there’s a chance it’ll prevent others from trying something similarly corrupt?
Maybe?
Please??
Yeah, now they’ll reconsider if their intended victims have a certain net worth.
After endless scams, have people figured out yet that Crypto is a scam?
The technology isn’t, but it can be easily abused by malicious actors, using the exact same methods as shown in Wolf of Wall Street.
Until there is an actual use case for Crypto, it’s definitely a scam as a technology. It exists only for investors and scammers, anyone attempting to actually use it is getting reamed.
My friend really hyped up crypto as the thing that would replace all local currencies in every country. That we would just have crypto, and thats it.
Thats when I knew it was a scam. My friend is an idiot, and falls for 100% of scams. When he’s preaching something, I know it’s wrong.
The ancient Greeks invented steam power, but didn’t take it any further than a novelty. That doesn’t make steam power a “scam.”
That doesn’t mean cryptocurrencies is like steam power.
Each is a technology with unique features for its time, and where there aren’t any practical applications initially.
For each steam power there are thousands of similar inventions that never see the light of practical use cases. We just remember those that had significant breakthroughs.
Still doesn’t mean crypto is like steam, nor that it will ever have any practical application
I’m sure the ancient Greeks said similar things about their steam pinwheels.
You might have had a salient point if the ancient Greeks made it popular for “solving thirst across the known world,” but really it was a novelty. Or if crypto was marketed as a novelty. But crypto was hyped to be the next big things, spreading around the world, no monetary boundaries. The same people making those claims are spending hundreds of millions on the election to making sure it stay unregulated with no consumer protection.
But sure, crypto somehow parallels steam?
I dunno, most steam power just involves passing an environmental burden down several generations, which seems like a scam to me.
I thought the same, but changed my mind after my bank card stopped working for foreign services. Now Monero is the most straightforward way to pay for my VPS and domain, since getting a foreign card would be prohibitively expensive, and the local companies with foreign servers - the ones I can pay with my card for - are likely to submit to the same censorship I want to bypass.
Even for those who can use their cards, crypto can be useful - for those who would be endangered by using a KYC payment method (activists and dissidents, for example). Even currencies without privacy protections are still leagues easier to use privately than a KYC method.
99.9% of people could not pay for what they want or need except the handful of niche places that happen to accept it. Can’t pay medical bills with it, can’t buy my food at the grocery store with it, can’t buy my gas with it, can’t really apply it where I want to, only in the few spaces I get to.
That’s not what the developers claimed it would do, or what the investors wanted it to do. It’s not cost effective or simple. It’s created more problems than it’s solved. It flat out a scam.
For the cases you described, there is the most convenient and anonymous type of money - cash)
But yea, reception is a problem. However, there is still an assortment of services accepting Monero, including the VPS that is vital for me now. It can also be used to buy prepaid cards, for cases when they are actuay accepted.
How is it convenient? Its not simple setting up a wallet, picking a coin, registering with a market, hoping that the merchant you want something for happens to take your type of coin? And being anonymous is a turn off for most people- the vast majority of people want consumer protection. Merchants carry higher risk with a volatile, unregulated market, so they are hesitant to accept it.
Why would I pay fees to buy a faux currency, to pay for a pre-paid card of the same currency I used to buy to the faux currency, to spend it on things that can’t be paid for with the faux currency anyway? What?!?!
There are only really two cryptocurrencies you should care about:
- Bitcoin - figure out how the Lighting network works
- Monero
That’s it. Which wallet you use is up to you, and there are plenty of easy ones freely available for phones (e.g. I use Monerujo on Android).
Bitcoin is the most widely used coin, and Monero is the most privacy-friendly. You can exchange between them using something like Kraken (perhaps the best place to buy/exchange crypto). Bitcoin transactions are slow (processed every 4 hours, I think?), expensive (like multiple dollars), and publicly traceable (if you have the wallet id, you can see everyone you’ve transacted with and how much), which is where Lightning comes in, which dramatically reduces transaction time, reduces fees, and improves privacy. Monero is private by default, and the way it handles transactions discourages mining farms, so there’s usually a bit less speculation and generally way lower fees (usually <$0.01).
As for why you’d do it, it’s because you value your privacy or you do a lot of international transactions (cryptocurrencies don’t care what country the two parties are in). If you buy a pre-paid card w/ credit or debit, the banks can track that transaction and potentially figure out what you used the pre-paid card for, and if they work w/ the government, it’s trivial to track that down (e.g. if you live in or visit a place like China). With Monero, they can only track interactions w/ fiat (i.e. buying or selling at an exchange), they can’t tell where you used those funds or anything of that sort. And that’s true even if they collude with the buyer or seller, they can’t track Monero wallet details to an individual on either end of the transaction.
Some stores offer a discount for buying w/ Monero (and potentially other coins), such as the YouTuber “Mental Outlaw,” who hosts based.win and offers a 10% discount for buying in Monero.
That said, there aren’t a ton of place that accept cryptocurrency, which is a bummer. But the more people start to use it for even small things, the more likely stores are to accept it. That’s my dog in this race, I want to use Monero where it’s available so the few stores that accept it continue to, and hopefully they’ll find enough value in it to get other stores on board. I don’t hate fiat or anything, I just hate how much tracking there is with other digital payment systems.
By “convenient” I meant in comparison with getting a foreign card for me, which involves bureaucracy and (by my measure) incredibly expensive travel. As for “picking a coin” - that is not really an issue, since swaps between currencies can be done instantly and very easily. And there are only a few major coins that are commonly accepted anyway (BTC, LTC, XMR and maybe ETH).
For people needing anonymity, giving up consumer protection may be an acceptable tradeoff. Same as with cash.
Pre-paid cards make sense because said cards may be unavailable where the customer resides, and either they can’t (like me) or don’t want to use a KYC method to buy them.
As for difficulty for the merchant - yeah, I agree it is a significant downside.
P.S. Fees are indeed a problem in Bitcoin at least, but Monero’s are barely noticeable.
I liked the public ledger of contracts idea someone had. You use the public block chain to sign and store stuff like mortgages, that way everyone sees the same copy.
The problem is that there are much-simpler ways to achieve that, if that’s all you want. You just take a digital copy of the contract, timestamp it, and have each party cryptographically sign the contract. You don’t need a distributed ledger for that.
Distribution ensure integrity of data. Let’s say we sign a contract, cryptographically sign it and all that good stuff but then oh no, where we stored your contract went up in fire and now I don’t have to honour that contract. (contrived example I know)
All parties who are involved in the contract can store a copy of a contract, even if it’s not distributed to everyone else.
The signing ensures the integrity of the data, whether using a public block chain or not.
The signed document can be distributed as widely as you’d like - it doesn’t need to be attached to a block chain to do this.
Imagine not believing in a use for crypto in 2024. lmao.
Imagine being so fleeced by a scam that you post messages pretending others are dumb for not falling for the scam lmao
Bold claim. Zero supporting arguments. Nice.
Oh no the poor bank, better have a bailout quick.
Given that he was embezzling bank funds to funnel into a fake crypto scam, and the people who those funds belonged to were not in fact the bank, and the article suggests those people were not made whole, I’m just gonna say that it’s not about the bank, it’s about the people who lost shit like their life savings to this a-hole.
Because the bank was insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the FDIC “absorbed the $47.1 million loss” after “Hanes’ fraudulent actions caused HTSB to fail and the bank investors to lose $9 million,” the US Attorney’s Office said.
It sounds like no customer with the bank lost anything. Only investors who I assume are well off anyways.
The banks customers were not the only people who he stole from. However, I concede the point.
Oh yeah. That’s fair.
I guess the silver lining here was that it could have been so much worse but thank goodness for FDIC.
That’s still 47 million of everyone’s money that could have been better spent
Yeah, that’s 47 million in tax payer dollars. So instead of stealing millions from a few people, it’s pennies from millions of people. Definitely a lot of better things that money could have gone to.
Plenty of people lost most of their retirement savings - FDIC only goes up to 250k which isn’t enough for super frugal FIRE. And definitely not enough when you get old and medical bills are crazy high in Murica.
Ok so I decided to read into this a little more. On FDICs website it says all customer funds should be available backing up my assumption that no customer of the bank lost any money: https://www.fdic.gov/resources/resolutions/bank-failures/failed-bank-list/heartlandtristate.html
It says:
The full balance of all deposit accounts has been transferred to Dream First Bank, N.A.
That contradicts statements on https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/ex-bank-ceo-gets-24-years-after-falling-for-crypto-scam-causing-bank-collapse/
Victims may never fully recover losses, DOJ says
In the community, people are still struggling to recover, Mitchell told NBC News, noting that some people lost up to 80 percent of their retirement savings. For at least one woman, retirement is impossible now, Mitchell said, and for another local woman, it has become difficult to pay for her 93-year-old mother’s nursing home.
US Attorney Kate E. Brubacher said that it’s hard to say when or if victims will be made whole again.
But it seems like they didn’t let it fail completely and transferred all assets and most liabilities to Dream First Bank? That would be nice for the granny with more than 250K in the account.
Actually 250k is the minimum for FDIC. Also I’m only basing my information on this single article but it says he stole 47 million and then the article goes on to say that FDIC absorbed the 47 million loss. Given this wording it sounds like every single dollar was covered.
They should play Beyonce’s Freedom to cap the sentencing
I hear she doesn’t consent to convicted criminals using her songs…
Even criminals deserve good outro themes. Its just the right thing to do.
Edit: I’ve said previously that for the hilariously guilty, the cue after they make in the interview room should be the intro to Angel by Sarah Maclachlan looped for until they are out of transit
