"It feels good to be wanted."
Written by Eric, Foresight News
In the early morning of October 14, 2026, Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) and Istanbul police closed in on a luxury mansion in the Beşiktaş district, taking HEX, PulseChain and PulseX founder Richard Heart and his wife into custody. Less than two years had passed between his days of high-profile flaunting of wealth and this pre-dawn raid.
Shortly after a Red Notice was issued in 2024, Richard Heart posted on X: "It feels good to be wanted." At the time, he had just been added to European law enforcement’s most-wanted list by Finnish police, with a billion-dollar lawsuit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) still hanging over his head. He continued to show off luxury watches on social media and shill HEX as usual, as if the wanted notice were a brand new medal of honor.
But justice was finally catching up with him.
According to Turkish media reports, the operation was coordinated by the Office of the Chief Public Prosecutor of Istanbul, with participation from the National Intelligence Organization, financial crime investigation units, INTERPOL liaison officers, and SWAT teams, who had conducted both technical and physical surveillance on the target property in the lead-up to the raid.
The items seized during the search were classic markers of Richard Heart’s public persona. Turkish media reports vary: one account states authorities recovered around $4 million in cash, 53 Rolex watches and 11 Patek Philippe timepieces, while another cites $600,000 in cash, 24 watches and 20 gold bracelets. What is confirmed is that officers also found unregistered firearms with over 1,000 rounds of ammunition, two drones, as well as cold wallets, encrypted hard drives, multiple high-performance computers and graphics cards. Turkish authorities have not yet disclosed whether these devices hold additional on-chain assets.
Turkish prosecutors also put forward a new claim, alleging that Heart operated under the alias "Big Whale James" in Turkey, building an Istanbul-based fraud network through shell companies registered in the U.S., Finland and Spain. This allegation has not yet been proven in any court of law.
A Billion-Dollar "Business" Built on the Back of a "Blockchain Certificate of Deposit"
In late 2018, Heart began publicly promoting HEX, framing it as the world’s first high-yield "blockchain certificate of deposit". The mechanism was simple: users sent ETH into a smart contract to receive HEX, then staked and locked their HEX for periods ranging from one day to 15 years to earn so-called interest. He publicly claimed the average annualized return could reach 38%!.(MISSING)
The SEC’s July 2023 indictment later laid out the numbers behind this business. During HEX’s token distribution period, the project raised a total of over 2.3 million ETH, worth more than $678 million at the time of deposit. Prosecutors alleged that 94%!to(MISSING) 97%!of(MISSING) the deposited funds were "cycled" back through intermediate wallets and trading platforms, creating a false impression of strong demand while allowing insiders to control a larger share of tokens.
HEX was followed by PulseChain and PulseX: the former was a fork of Ethereum, the latter a fork of Uniswap. Heart deliberately framed the two rounds of fundraising as "sacrifices" rather than "investments", with participants sending crypto assets to designated addresses in exchange for future token allocations. The SEC determined the two rounds raised over $345 million and $676 million respectively, and cited Heart’s own public claim that PLS could rise 14,000-fold in value.
Across the three projects, total fundraising exceeded $1.5 billion. The indictment also alleged Heart misappropriated at least $12 million to purchase luxury cars, high-end watches, and the famous 555-carat black diamond known as "The Enigma", which he bought for roughly $5 million. It should be noted that these are all allegations in the SEC’s complaint, and have never been established as fact in a court of law.
The U.S. Lost Its Case, but Finland Did Not Give Up
Despite this brazen conduct, the legal system failed to deliver timely justice.
Two years after the SEC’s case was launched, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in February 2025 on the grounds of insufficient connection to U.S. jurisdiction. The SEC did not amend its complaint to refile the case, leading to a full closure of the matter. Heart’s supporters framed the ruling as a total victory for their camp, and his legal team has long argued that the relevant transactions did not qualify as investment contracts, and that writing code and discussing open-source software falls under the protection of free speech.
Finland chose to pursue the case through tax-related charges. In 2024, Finnish police indicted Heart for aggravated tax fraud, involving tax evasion on hundreds of millions of euros in crypto income, alongside a separate charge for a 2021 assault on a 16-year-old minor. In late 2024, a Finnish court ordered Heart’s pre-trial detention in absentia, and INTERPOL issued a Red Notice at Finland’s request. In early 2025, Finnish police seized around 20 luxury watches worth an estimated $2.6 million from one of Heart’s residences in Espoo.
A Red Notice is not an international arrest warrant, nor is it a criminal conviction — it simply requests that countries locate and temporarily detain a wanted individual. Heart apparently treated it as nothing more than a joke-worthy piece of paper, until Turkey turned it into real handcuffs. The next step will depend on whether Finland formally submits an extradition request, and how Turkish courts rule on the matter; such procedures typically take months to resolve.
Authorities have not disclosed how Heart traveled from the Netherlands to Turkey to evade capture.
Heart’s official registered residence is in Helsinki. When a Finnish court ordered his detention on September 13, 2024, he failed to appear in court, and police had no idea of his whereabouts. When officers raided his home in Espoo months later, the property was already completely empty.
But he never laid low for a single day while on the run: he continued to post on X and shill HEX as usual, celebrating HEX’s fourth anniversary and hailing the contract’s "flawless operation". He even put together a list including Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ), FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), Terra’s Do Kwon, and Three Arrows Capital’s Su Zhu, framing it as an endless roster of "people who dislike Richard Heart, who have either gone to jail or gone bankrupt". The subtext was clear: everyone who hated him ended up in ruin, while he remained free and untouchable.
While Finnish police issued a wanted notice for him in front of an empty house, he was living in a luxury mansion on the Bosphorus shore with his wife, along with crates of cash and luxury watches, firearms and ammunition, and two drones.
The Devout Followers of HEX
The HEX community calls itself Hexicans, a group with a signature color scheme of magenta and orange for all their group gatherings. In August 2023, the documentary *The Highest of Stakes* premiered in Los Angeles; just three days prior, the SEC had filed suit against Heart. Hexicans still rented out an entire theater for the screening in their signature colors, turning the event into something akin to a prom. Over $1 million of the documentary’s production budget came from community crypto donations. The fundraising effort made little progress for the first 50 days, until a wallet holding over $300 million in crypto assets made a single $450,000 contribution, pushing the project over its funding target to move forward. The community knew full well who owned that wallet, even if no one said it out loud.
Critic Eric Wall said Heart "has clearly read the books on how to build a cult", referring to *The 48 Laws of Power*. Heart’s playbook — building a personal myth, flaunting jewelry, claiming secret sources of wealth — followed the book’s guidance almost line by line. For his part, Heart repeatedly reminded his critics that he had raised $27 million for medical research, and that those who attacked him only knew how to tear things down, not build them up.
Why does this narrative resonate so well? The answer may be surprisingly simple: early entrants to the ecosystem did make real profits, and the staking lock-up mechanism made most participants reluctant to cut their losses. Admitting the project was a scam would mean admitting they were the last ones left holding the bag. When the SEC’s case was dismissed in 2025, Hexicans celebrated the ruling as a total exoneration, even though the judge’s ruling only addressed jurisdictional issues, not Heart’s actual innocence.
Now that the founder has been cuffed in Istanbul, Hexicans on X are still flooding timelines with claims that the arrest is persecution of open-source developers. HEX has dropped 99.5%!.(MISSING) from its all-time high of $0.51 in September 2021. The code still runs on the chain, seven years into the project’s story, and its believers still believe. This is arguably the "most expensive" form of faith in the crypto space.