Turkey Confirms Hex Founder's Arrest and a $7.15M Cash Seizure

Turkey's justice ministry confirmed on Saturday that Richard James Schueler, the founder of Hex and PulseChain who goes by Richard Heart, was detained in Istanbul three days earlier. The operation ran on Wednesday 14 October in the city's Besiktas district, and he was taken with his wife; three men police identified as his bodyguards were detained afterwards, five people in all. Searches of 15 addresses turned up about $7.15 million in US cash, 160,000 Turkish lira and six cryptocurrency cold wallets whose contents have not been disclosed. The ministry tied the case to an Interpol Red Notice. No charges in Turkey have been listed.

The cash figure has moved once already

Saturday's statement is not the first count. The Block notes that Turkish media reports on Wednesday had the cash at $4 million and the watches at 64; the ministry's figures are $7.15 million and 28 watches. Neither number has been withdrawn and neither account addresses the other, so they do not reconcile. The searches ran across three districts and produced a long inventory beyond the cash: 97 pieces of jewelry, 300 bags, 19 graphics cards, seven firearms and 1,400 rounds of ammunition. Bitcoin.com News, filing at 16:30 UTC on Saturday, adds 29 phones, 12 laptops, 19 storage drives and 46 USB devices. Anadolu reported nine vehicles registered to his wife were impounded, a count that rests on one account.

A notice from 2024, and a US case that ended

The Red Notice was issued in December 2024 at Finland's request, where authorities sought him on suspicion of gross tax evasion. Bitcoin.com puts the Finnish allegations at aggravated tax fraud involving hundreds of millions of euros, while the ministry linked the notice to allegations of $1 billion in crypto fraud in the United States and Finland. A Red Notice is a request to locate and provisionally arrest someone, not an international warrant, and none of the allegations against Schueler has produced a conviction. Whether the notice is still active is stated in neither account.

The American case is finished. The SEC sued him in July 2023, alleging he raised $1 billion in an unregistered offering and misappropriated at least $12 million. Judge Carol Bagley Amon dismissed it in February 2025 on jurisdictional grounds, finding the conduct had not been sufficiently directed at US investors, and the agency said in April 2025 that it did not intend to refile. The Finnish file is the one that produced the notice, and it is the one still open.

"Judicial proceedings regarding the suspects and examinations of the seized materials are ongoing," the justice minister said.

Holders sold twice

HEX fell on the first reports and again on the confirmation, and the two drops are measured differently. Cointelegraph, writing at 12:12 UTC on Thursday from CoinMarketCap data, had the token down nearly 30% over 24 hours at $0.0006, with market value sliding from more than $500 million on Wednesday to $340 million. The Block, two days later, has it down about 14% over the prior 24 hours on CoinGecko numbers. Different windows, different providers, and neither outlet addresses the other's figure. We could not establish a single decline for the week from the published accounts.

What the seizure does not settle

Six cold wallets in police custody is not the same as six wallets police can spend from, and nothing published says whether any keys or passphrases were recovered. Ownership of seized coins is its own fight once the criminal matter closes, and a London court spent this year deciding which law governs claims to 61,000 seized bitcoin. No extradition request has been confirmed, and the ministry did not say whether one has arrived. Finland's national investigation bureau declined to comment to Cointelegraph, and The Block's questions to the Helsinki police and to Schueler's attorney in the SEC case were unanswered at the time of writing. Crypto prosecutions that end in a sentence take years to get there, as the impersonator who stole $15.9 million from Coinbase users found. This one has not reached a charge sheet.