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.

> 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.

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.

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.

>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.

"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.

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.

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