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The trail of stolen cash began at a bitcoin kiosk in Bend, where on Sept. 6, 2022, a 69-year-old woman deposited $10,000 to pay a debt to an unidentified “U.S. Treasury Official.”
And it ended at an overseas cryptocurrency exchange being used by an Indian scammer, which recently turned the funds over to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Back in 2022, the “official” was on the phone, saying the woman’s Amazon account had been used to buy fraudulent Apple products, and threatening to arrest her if she didn’t pay up. After being convinced to deposit an additional $13,000 at yet another kiosk, the woman realized she’d been scammed and called the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office.
Deputies contacted federal investigators, who, according to a federal seizure request, traced the bitcoins to an account on an offshore cryptocurrency exchange controlled by Shaishav Ramavat, who lives in India. Investigators identified victims of similar scams in Virginia, California and Alabama, and when they reached out to the exchange, OKX, they learned that Ramavat had been laundering the money through various cryptocurrencies, a process known as “chain hopping.”
Of the 190 transactions tied to Ramavat through OKX, authorities traced 90% to kiosks like the one in Bend, which “indicate that these funds are likely criminal proceeds” as part of a “large-scale fraud scheme operating from India,” Special Agent Guy Gino wrote in a seizure request filed Sept. 19 in U.S. District Court.
In March, OKX handed $187,000 in cryptocurrency from Ramavat’s account over to Homeland Security, which converted it to dollars and then filed a legal forfeiture notice this month.