The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’

周日读物:《加密货币骗局:一场令小镇反目成仇的风波》

The Daily

新闻

2025-03-02

27 分钟
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Jim Tucker could hardly believe what he was hearing. It sounded like fiction, a nightmare too outlandish for an unassuming town like his. It was July 2023, and Tucker was hosting a meeting of the board of Heartland Tri-State Bank, a community-owned business in a small Kansas town called Elkhart. Heartland was a beloved local institution and a source of Tucker family pride: Tucker served on the board with his elderly father, Bill, who founded the bank four decades earlier. All of the board members — the Tuckers and several other farmers and businesspeople — had known one another for years. That evening, however, they were gathering to discuss what seemed, on its face, an epic betrayal. Over the past few weeks, the bank’s longtime president, a popular local businessman named Shan Hanes, had ordered a series of unexplained wire transfers that drained tens of millions of dollars from the bank. Hanes converted the funds into cryptocurrencies. Then the money vanished.
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  • Last year I came across a strange and really interesting story.

  • It was about a bank in Kansas that collapsed.

  • The bank was called Heartland Tri State bank, and it was located in this tiny rural community in the southwestern corner of Kansas called Elkhart.

  • The town of Elkhart is one of those really tight knit, isolated communities whose charm and whole sense of itself kind of derives from the way that it's cut off from the outside world.

  • Everyone in town knows each other.

  • Everyone in town trusts each other.

  • But a bank collapse is really serious business.

  • The federal government has to step in.

  • They have to orchestrate a takeover really quickly, almost under the COVID of night, to stop panic from spreading in the market.

  • On the day that Heartland collapsed and that it was taken over in July 2023, a really dramatic scene played out on the streets of Elkhart.

  • There were blacked out SUVs surrounding the bank, cargo vans with license plates that nobody in town recognized.

  • You had government officials walking into the bank building with power tools and ladders, pushing all the furniture to the perimeter of the room, taking down the security system, removing laptops and computers, and piling all that hardware into the vans parked outside.

  • And then a state banking official got up in front of the staff and made an announcement.

  • The bank had fallen victim to a scam, and now it was insolvent.