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).
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.
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
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."
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
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.
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.
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?
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.