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This wasn't a sophisticated attack - Pig Butchering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam. The s

This wasn't a sophisticated attack - Pig Butchering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam. The scammers promised him outrageous returns, and he kept giving them more and more money - without ever actually seeing any real returns. One has to wonder how this bank ever managed to be successful before. With all the fraud and scams in the world - how did no one find this guy sooner?

hylaride 2y ago
It's a classic example of a long-term trust network getting breached, in this case by a trusted local that got in over their head. The bank was created to provide loans to locals, mostly farmers where everybody knew how farm loans worked and obviously did well doing that. People don't understand that these trust networks are only as strong as the weakest link. Even with everyone having good intentions, they don't understand that people can be blackmailed, have mental health breakdowns, etc.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  It's also a more poignant tale of a small, community where (thanks, Internet!) international grifters could nonetheless inject themselves. Or, more cynically, this guy was destined to be scammed and the internet in short order put him to the test. One has to think though that if it were a local scammer we would not be talking tens of millions of dollars.
  - kingofheroes 2y ago
    Its interesting to think about it this way. Like, this community's "financial opsec" was their isolation from the rest of the world. No one on the outside can attack them if no one can even point out the town on the map. The internet makes that approach impossible.
    - JKCalhoun 2y ago
      Yeah, it might even be worst than that. If I were a scammer I would seek out these small-town banks looking for my mark. And while we're at it, find the business owners of the auto dealerships in any metropolitan area. These families and the ones that own the largest construction contractor companies are the lesser-known millionaires living in our midst that might have large bank accounts. And who knew small town church coffers might have millions lying around.
Aurornis 2y ago
The profiles of scam victims aren’t always what you expect. A lot of otherwise successful people reached their positions through networking, trust, and risky bets that advanced their careers. A lot of businesses operate on trust networks at some level. The difference is that successful operators in this space will only place calculated bets and will rapidly update their level of trust when someone fails to follow through. This person apparently didn’t learn that lesson. There is also a tendency to keep digging once a victim is deep in the hole. They know their job is already lost if they stop now, but just maybe there’s a chance that a little more digging will reveal a turnaround that covers up their past mistake. Scammers exploit this to encourage incrementally more digging into an already deep hole.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  >A lot of businesses operate on trust networks at some level. 100% this. No one is immune. Not even "savvy tech people;" Theranos and FTX were similar affinity frauds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud) commited against Silicon Valley old-money and VC circles, respectively.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    To be clear: no biotech VC ever invested in Theranos. The people who are actually “savvy” in that industry (everyone) stayed clear because even cursory due diligence revealed the core problem with the science. That’s what separates competent people from rubes and tech VCs. A bit of due diligence.
  - harikb 2y ago
    +1. It is also possible for tech savvy people to fall for regular scams (automated text in the middle of the night from your bank etc..). It is 2025 - still banks can't do everything through their apps. To Fintech: Stop SMS based OTP , have better apps. You no longer have the excuse that you can't hire engineers.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Why I've not been scammed. Why I'm not successful.
ryandrake 2y ago
"This Guy" is everywhere. People fall for scams all the time, and as a society, we are failing to educate them with the sense to sniff them out. That, and a regulatory environment where everything goes, means that people of all walks of life are getting suckered every day. Only a matter of time that one of those people happened to be a small local bank manager with access to millions. If it wasn't a crypto scam, it would be a lottery scam, or a job offer scam, or romance/pigbutchering scam, or a tech support phone scam, or a meatspace MLM scam like Amway and Herbalife. There is no shortage of ways gullible, financially-illiterate people can be separated from their money.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  This exactly. And Crypto's biggest "innovation" by far was giving us an entirely new unregulated financial market with zero consumer protections that included, as a bonus, the trappings and added complexity of software and let con men the world over dust off every money scheme from the last hundred years and do a fresh round. Edit: Further, "education" shouldn't even be a factor here. You should not need to protect yourself from being scammed. Taking advantage of people's trust and stealing their money should be illegal, the offenders should be punished, and the victims made whole. There is no reason in a civilized society to permit financial crimes, which is what this shit is. Stealing is fucking stealing, whether you take something from a store, whether a bank issues bullshit fees, whether an employer doesn't pay fair wages, whether a con man tricks you into buying ape pictures.
  - plagiarist 2y ago
    Yep. Much of cryptocurrency content is just "Discover Why Financial Regulations Exist" speedruns.
  - Animats 2y ago
    > You should not need to protect yourself from being scammed. Under the current administration, you need to protect yourself far more than before. - The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is gone. - The Justice Department will focus on "violent crime", even though that's mostly the job of local law enforcement and the FBI doesn't handle 911 calls. In terms of dollars, white collar crime is far bigger than violent crime. (Burglary in the US is way down, about a fifth of what it was in 1990.) - The administration plan is to move crypto enforcement from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Heavy payoffs by the crypto industry have enabled this. [1] It's called "deregulation", suckers. Open season on Americans. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/technology/crypto-industry-spending-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/technology/crypto-industr...
tetromino_ 2y ago
I wonder if something literally went wrong with this guy's head. Early onset dementia or something along those lines. And alas, the scammers discovered him before the doctors did.
- hylaride 2y ago
  The fact that a decade previously in 2011, Hanes had been found to push a bunch of questionable loans, was fired, but then a year later was back in as president shows that he probably just got greedy.
dr-detroit 2y ago
[dead]
doctoboggan 2y ago
> without ever actually seeing any real returns. I am sure he "saw" real returns on a very real looking app or website. As we transition to a cashless society we are all getting use to the numbers on our computers and phones representing real money. My paystub is digital, it goes into my bank account directly and the numbers on my computer go up. I spend money by taping a computer chip onto another computer chip and then the numbers in my bank account drop. I can also digitally transfer those numbers to a brokerage account and click a few buttons and then the numbers go up and down depending on how people are feeling about the stock market. In the past few years, seemingly always up, which I think is priming young or naive investors to believe investments never fail.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  > I think is priming young or naive investors to believe investments never fail. Investments fail, there are plenty in the news. Broad market indices, however, don’t fail. There have been numerous bailouts over the previous decades. Why would one assume any future government wouldn’t continue bailouts if all the previous ones did?
  - sour-taste 2y ago
    We've never had an executive whose financial policy positions include eliminating FDIC and that much of the federal deficit is fraudulent so can safely be disregarded and left unpaid. Believing in continuity at this time is a poor bet.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    Governments and nations collapse. Anyone who was bullish in 235 CE Rome would have died long before their investments would be back in the black.
    - mandevil 2y ago
      235 CE Rome? The Western Roman Empire lasts another two centuries- Romulus Augustus is deposed in 476 CE. That's longer than the US Constitution has existed (ratified in 1788).
jslaby 2y ago
Unless I missed somewhere in the article, it is possible that it wasn't a scam and he probably just leveraged his initial stake. When it fell below the margin, he needed the money to avoid the loss.
- baobabKoodaa 2y ago
  The article talks about him being persuaded by persons "met on the internet" to "invest" in "crypto". There is absolutely no scenario in which an attractive woman sends you a LinkedIn message with the intent of getting you to make legitimate - albeit leveraged - crypto investments.
LiquidSky 2y ago
>One has to wonder how this bank ever managed to be successful before. The article touches on exactly this: >No one in Elkhart has managed to make sense of the mystery at the center of the betrayal: Why did a successful, financially sophisticated banker, a man the whole town trusted for decades, gamble his life away for a shot at crypto riches? Though this guy had been previously fired from the same position at the bank in 2011 for financial irregularities under his watch, so they kind of only have themselves to blame: >But in 2011, the leaders of the Kansas Bank Corporation grew concerned about Hanes, according to Tina Call, who served on the company’s board at the time. They had discovered problems in his loan portfolio — borrowers who lacked sufficient collateral, financial paperwork that didn’t seem to add up. >Hanes was eventually fired for reasons that remain in dispute years later.

hylaride 2y ago

It's a classic example of a long-term trust network getting breached, in this case by a trusted local that got in over their head. The bank was created to provide loans to locals, mostly farmers where everybody knew how farm loans worked and obviously did well doing that. People don't understand that these trust networks are only as strong as the weakest link. Even with everyone having good intentions, they don't understand that people can be blackmailed, have mental health breakdowns, etc.

JKCalhoun 2y ago
It's also a more poignant tale of a small, community where (thanks, Internet!) international grifters could nonetheless inject themselves. Or, more cynically, this guy was destined to be scammed and the internet in short order put him to the test. One has to think though that if it were a local scammer we would not be talking tens of millions of dollars.
- kingofheroes 2y ago
  Its interesting to think about it this way. Like, this community's "financial opsec" was their isolation from the rest of the world. No one on the outside can attack them if no one can even point out the town on the map. The internet makes that approach impossible.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    Yeah, it might even be worst than that. If I were a scammer I would seek out these small-town banks looking for my mark. And while we're at it, find the business owners of the auto dealerships in any metropolitan area. These families and the ones that own the largest construction contractor companies are the lesser-known millionaires living in our midst that might have large bank accounts. And who knew small town church coffers might have millions lying around.

Aurornis 2y ago

The profiles of scam victims aren’t always what you expect. A lot of otherwise successful people reached their positions through networking, trust, and risky bets that advanced their careers. A lot of businesses operate on trust networks at some level. The difference is that successful operators in this space will only place calculated bets and will rapidly update their level of trust when someone fails to follow through. This person apparently didn’t learn that lesson. There is also a tendency to keep digging once a victim is deep in the hole. They know their job is already lost if they stop now, but just maybe there’s a chance that a little more digging will reveal a turnaround that covers up their past mistake. Scammers exploit this to encourage incrementally more digging into an already deep hole.

the_snooze 2y ago
>A lot of businesses operate on trust networks at some level. 100% this. No one is immune. Not even "savvy tech people;" Theranos and FTX were similar affinity frauds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud) commited against Silicon Valley old-money and VC circles, respectively.
- throwup238 2y ago
  To be clear: no biotech VC ever invested in Theranos. The people who are actually “savvy” in that industry (everyone) stayed clear because even cursory due diligence revealed the core problem with the science. That’s what separates competent people from rubes and tech VCs. A bit of due diligence.
- harikb 2y ago
  +1. It is also possible for tech savvy people to fall for regular scams (automated text in the middle of the night from your bank etc..). It is 2025 - still banks can't do everything through their apps. To Fintech: Stop SMS based OTP , have better apps. You no longer have the excuse that you can't hire engineers.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
Why I've not been scammed. Why I'm not successful.

ryandrake 2y ago

"This Guy" is everywhere. People fall for scams all the time, and as a society, we are failing to educate them with the sense to sniff them out. That, and a regulatory environment where everything goes, means that people of all walks of life are getting suckered every day. Only a matter of time that one of those people happened to be a small local bank manager with access to millions. If it wasn't a crypto scam, it would be a lottery scam, or a job offer scam, or romance/pigbutchering scam, or a tech support phone scam, or a meatspace MLM scam like Amway and Herbalife. There is no shortage of ways gullible, financially-illiterate people can be separated from their money.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
This exactly. And Crypto's biggest "innovation" by far was giving us an entirely new unregulated financial market with zero consumer protections that included, as a bonus, the trappings and added complexity of software and let con men the world over dust off every money scheme from the last hundred years and do a fresh round. Edit: Further, "education" shouldn't even be a factor here. You should not need to protect yourself from being scammed. Taking advantage of people's trust and stealing their money should be illegal, the offenders should be punished, and the victims made whole. There is no reason in a civilized society to permit financial crimes, which is what this shit is. Stealing is fucking stealing, whether you take something from a store, whether a bank issues bullshit fees, whether an employer doesn't pay fair wages, whether a con man tricks you into buying ape pictures.
- plagiarist 2y ago
  Yep. Much of cryptocurrency content is just "Discover Why Financial Regulations Exist" speedruns.
- Animats 2y ago
  > You should not need to protect yourself from being scammed. Under the current administration, you need to protect yourself far more than before. - The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is gone. - The Justice Department will focus on "violent crime", even though that's mostly the job of local law enforcement and the FBI doesn't handle 911 calls. In terms of dollars, white collar crime is far bigger than violent crime. (Burglary in the US is way down, about a fifth of what it was in 1990.) - The administration plan is to move crypto enforcement from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Heavy payoffs by the crypto industry have enabled this. [1] It's called "deregulation", suckers. Open season on Americans. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/technology/crypto-industry-spending-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/technology/crypto-industr...

tetromino_ 2y ago

I wonder if something literally went wrong with this guy's head. Early onset dementia or something along those lines. And alas, the scammers discovered him before the doctors did.

hylaride 2y ago
The fact that a decade previously in 2011, Hanes had been found to push a bunch of questionable loans, was fired, but then a year later was back in as president shows that he probably just got greedy.

dr-detroit 2y ago

[dead]

doctoboggan 2y ago

> without ever actually seeing any real returns. I am sure he "saw" real returns on a very real looking app or website. As we transition to a cashless society we are all getting use to the numbers on our computers and phones representing real money. My paystub is digital, it goes into my bank account directly and the numbers on my computer go up. I spend money by taping a computer chip onto another computer chip and then the numbers in my bank account drop. I can also digitally transfer those numbers to a brokerage account and click a few buttons and then the numbers go up and down depending on how people are feeling about the stock market. In the past few years, seemingly always up, which I think is priming young or naive investors to believe investments never fail.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
> I think is priming young or naive investors to believe investments never fail. Investments fail, there are plenty in the news. Broad market indices, however, don’t fail. There have been numerous bailouts over the previous decades. Why would one assume any future government wouldn’t continue bailouts if all the previous ones did?
- sour-taste 2y ago
  We've never had an executive whose financial policy positions include eliminating FDIC and that much of the federal deficit is fraudulent so can safely be disregarded and left unpaid. Believing in continuity at this time is a poor bet.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  Governments and nations collapse. Anyone who was bullish in 235 CE Rome would have died long before their investments would be back in the black.
  - mandevil 2y ago
    235 CE Rome? The Western Roman Empire lasts another two centuries- Romulus Augustus is deposed in 476 CE. That's longer than the US Constitution has existed (ratified in 1788).

jslaby 2y ago

Unless I missed somewhere in the article, it is possible that it wasn't a scam and he probably just leveraged his initial stake. When it fell below the margin, he needed the money to avoid the loss.

baobabKoodaa 2y ago
The article talks about him being persuaded by persons "met on the internet" to "invest" in "crypto". There is absolutely no scenario in which an attractive woman sends you a LinkedIn message with the intent of getting you to make legitimate - albeit leveraged - crypto investments.

LiquidSky 2y ago

>One has to wonder how this bank ever managed to be successful before. The article touches on exactly this: >No one in Elkhart has managed to make sense of the mystery at the center of the betrayal: Why did a successful, financially sophisticated banker, a man the whole town trusted for decades, gamble his life away for a shot at crypto riches? Though this guy had been previously fired from the same position at the bank in 2011 for financial irregularities under his watch, so they kind of only have themselves to blame: >But in 2011, the leaders of the Kansas Bank Corporation grew concerned about Hanes, according to Tina Call, who served on the company’s board at the time. They had discovered problems in his loan portfolio — borrowers who lacked sufficient collateral, financial paperwork that didn’t seem to add up. >Hanes was eventually fired for reasons that remain in dispute years later.