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

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, I'm David Yaffe Bellany, and I cover the cryptocurrency world for The New York Times.
0:10.4	Last year, I came across a strange and really interesting story.
0:15.6	It was about a bank in Kansas that collapsed.
0:19.4	The bank was called Heartland Tri-State Bank,
0:22.1	and it was located in this tiny rural community
0:25.0	in the southwestern corner of Kansas called Elkhart.
0:29.0	The town of Elkhart is one of those really tight-knit,
0:33.1	isolated communities whose charm and whole sense of itself
0:37.2	kind of derives from the way that it's cut off from the outside world.
0:41.7	Everyone in town knows each other. Everyone in town trusts each other. But a bank collapses really
0:47.9	serious business. The federal government has to step in. They have to orchestrate a takeover really
0:53.8	quickly, almost under
0:55.1	the cover of night, to stop panic from spreading in the market.
1:00.9	On the day that Heartland collapsed and that it was taken over in July 23, a really dramatic
1:07.8	scene played out on the streets of Elkhart. There were blacked-out SUVs surrounding the bank.
1:14.6	Cargo vans with license plates that nobody in town recognized.
1:19.6	You had government officials walking into the bank building with power tools and ladders,
1:24.6	pushing all the furniture to the perimeter of the room,
1:28.5	taking down the security system, removing laptops and computers,
1:33.2	and piling all that hardware into the vans parked outside.
1:38.1	And then a state banking official got up in front of the staff and made an announcement.
1:44.0	The bank had fallen victim to a scam,
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 18 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New York Times, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The New York Times and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.