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

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

The Daily vor 1 Jahr

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27:37

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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