The former CEO of a Kansas Bank has been sentenced to 24 years and five months in prison after he embezzled $47 million from customers and lost it in a cryptocurrency scam known as “pig butchering.” Prosecutors proved to a jury that Shan Hanes, the former CEO of Heartland Tri-State Bank in Elkhart, KS, embezzled funds from a church, his daughter’s college savings account, an investment club, and his bank’s customers before he lost every dime to the scammers.
A lot of bank shareholders lost their retirement savings and can no longer afford nursing home care because of Hanes’s crimes. Prosecutors showed that Hanes fell victim to a “pig butchering” scam starting in 2022.
While “pig butchering” sounds like a fun weekend at Ted Nugent’s house, it’s actually a complex con in which scammers convince dummies like bank CEOs that they can make a quick and massive turnaround with a crypto investment. Once the “pig” commits that first act of embezzlement, the scammers then pretend that the funds are stuck or “locked” until they receive ever-increasing amounts of money.
The “pig” then typically panics and sends even more of his customers’ money in increasingly large wire transfers. Hanes circumvented the bank’s wire transfer policies and lied to employees about where the money was really going.
Depositors didn’t lose any money due to Hanes’s stupidity, but shareholders were wiped out when the bank collapsed. The Heartland Tri-State Bank was one of only five banks in the US that failed in 2023, despite the horrifying Joe Biden/Kamala Harris economy that we’re all suffering through.
The judge was so angry with Hanes’s lack of remorse and abject stupidity with his customers’ money that he imposed a sentence two-and-a-half years longer than prosecutors had requested.
