Two men were sentenced Thursday for staging crashes on New York City highways to get fraudulent insurance payouts.
Jaime Huiracocha, 53, and Victor Murillo, 34, pleaded guilty to charges relating to the crashes that happened between August and October 2024.
Gov. Kathy Hochul and Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz announced the details of the investigation Thursday.
Prosecutors said Huiracocha and Murillo recruited others to participate in three separate crashes, enticing them with promises of thousands in cash.
Murillo was the designated driver. He would slam on the brakes of the car he was driving to intentionally cause the driver behind him to rear-end the car, prosecutors said. One time, the car behind Murillo braked to avoid a collision, but Murillo reversed into the vehicle to cause a crash, prosecutors said. That incident was caught on dashcam video.
Meanwhile, Huiracocha…
THE HASHFLARE “CLOUD MINING” PONZI SCHEME (GLOBAL/ESTONIA)
Date: February 13, 2025 (Guilty Pleas) Perpetrators: Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turogin
Case Description: This $577 million cryptocurrency fraud remains one of the largest digital asset scams in history, with major legal developments concluding in 2025. Potapenko and Turogin operated “Hashflare,” which they marketed as a massive cryptocurrency mining operation. Hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide purchased “mining contracts,” believing they were renting hash power to mine Bitcoin. In reality, the duo was running a sophisticated Ponzi scheme.
They created fake customer dashboards that showed “real-time” mining profits, but the money being paid out was simply the capital of newer investors. They laundered the proceeds through shell companies to purchase luxury real estate and a fleet of high-end vehicles. After a massive international investigation involving the FBI and Estonian authorities, the pair agreed to forfeit over $400 million in assets. This case underscores the “Cyber-enabled Fraud” warning issued by the FATF in early 2026: as technology evolves, the scale of fraud moves from local millions to global billions in the blink of an eye.
Link to Original: ACFE – High Profile Fraud of 2025