REDWOOD CITY — Police on Thursday arrested a 22-year-old Fresno man they say tried to scam an elderly Redwood City woman.
The victim contacted police around 3 p.m. Wednesday after becoming suspicious that she was the target of a fraud scheme, the Redwood City Police Department said in a news release.
Police said the woman reported receiving messages on her iPhone that AppleCare had detected suspicious activity. She then spoke with people posing as support representatives, who told her there were fraudulent charges associated with her bank account.
The suspects instructed the woman to withdraw cash from her account and hand it over to a courier, who would come to her residence to collect the money, police said.
Police intervened at that point. They coordinated further communication with the suspects, as well as put together a plan to identify and apprehend the courier if one…
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