"Being wanted feels good."

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

On the morning of October 14, 2026, the Turkish National Intelligence Organization and Istanbul police executed a raid at a mansion in the Beşiktaş district, capturing Richard Heart, the founder of HEX, PulseChain, and PulseX, along with his wife. It had been less than two years from ostentatious displays of wealth to a dawn raid.

In 2024, shortly after a red notice was issued, Richard Heart posted a line on X, "Being wanted feels good." At that time, he had just been placed on the European most-wanted list by Finnish police, with a billion-dollar lawsuit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) looming over him. Yet, he continued to flaunt luxury watches and promote HEX on social media, as if the wanted notice was a new badge of honor.

However, good and evil will eventually be rewarded.

According to Turkish media reports, this operation was coordinated by the Istanbul Chief Prosecutor's Office, with the National Intelligence Organization, the Financial Crimes Investigation Department, Interpol officials, and SWAT teams all involved, conducting both technical and physical surveillance on the target address beforehand.

The search results were filled with Richard Heart symbols. Turkish media gave varying accounts; one stated approximately $4 million in cash, fifty-three Rolexes, and eleven Patek Philippes, while another reported $600,000 in cash, twenty-four watches, and twenty gold bracelets. It can be confirmed that there were unlicensed firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition, two drones, as well as cold wallets, encrypted hard drives, multiple high-performance computers, and graphics cards on site. Whether these devices contained more on-chain assets has not been disclosed by Turkish officials.

The Turkish prosecution also introduced a new claim, stating that Heart was known in Turkey as "Whale James," having built a fraud network based in Istanbul through shell companies located in the United States, Finland, and Spain. This allegation has yet to be substantiated in any court.

A billion-dollar "business" starting from "blockchain certificates"

At the end of 2018, Heart began publicly promoting HEX, packaging it as the world's first high-yield "blockchain certificate." The concept was simple: users deposited ETH into a contract to receive HEX, then staked HEX, locking it up for a period ranging from one day to fifteen years to earn what he referred to as interest. He publicly claimed an average annual return of up to 38%.

The SEC's July 2023 lawsuit later calculated the business's figures. During the issuance period, HEX raised over 2.3 million ETH, valued at over $678 million at the time of deposit, with 94% to 97% of the funds reportedly recycled through intermediary wallets and trading platforms to create an illusion of high demand while allowing insiders to control more tokens.

Following HEX was PulseChain and PulseX. The former was a fork of Ethereum, while the latter was a fork of Uniswap; both fundraising rounds were deliberately termed "sacrifices" rather than "investments," with participants sending crypto assets to designated addresses, awaiting future token distributions. The SEC identified that each round raised over $345 million and $676 million respectively, citing Heart's own words, claiming that PLS could increase by 14,000 times.

The three projects collectively raised over $1.5 billion. The lawsuit also accused Heart of misappropriating at least $12 million to buy luxury cars, high-end watches, and the famous 555-carat black diamond "Mystery," which was purchased for about $5 million. It should be noted that these are allegations in the SEC lawsuit and have never been established as facts in court.

The U.S. didn't win the lawsuit, and Finland didn't give up

In the face of such blatant criminal behavior, the law failed to deliver timely justice.

After two years of the SEC case, in February 2025, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds of insufficient connection to U.S. jurisdiction. The SEC did not amend the complaint to refile, and the case ended there. Heart's supporters viewed this as a complete victory, and his legal team maintained that the relevant transactions did not constitute investment contracts, arguing that coding and discussing open-source software fell under the realm of free speech.

Finland chose to act on tax matters. In 2024, Finnish police accused Heart of serious tax fraud involving hundreds of millions of euros in crypto income tax evasion, along with an allegation from 2021 of assaulting a 16-year-old. At the end of 2024, a Finnish court ordered his detention due to the defendant's absence, and Interpol issued a red notice at Finland's request. In early 2025, Finnish police seized approximately 20 luxury watches worth around $2.6 million from Heart's residence in Espoo.

A red notice is not an international arrest warrant, nor is it a conviction; it is merely a request for countries to assist in locating and temporarily detaining a person. Heart clearly treated it as a piece of paper to joke about until Turkey turned it into handcuffs. The next point of interest will be whether Finland formally requests extradition and how the Turkish courts will decide, as such procedures often take months.

As for how Heart escaped from the Netherlands to Turkey, officials have not disclosed that information.

Heart's official residence is registered in Helsinki. When a Finnish court ordered his detention on September 13, 2024, he was not present, and the police did not know where he was. Months later, when police raided his home in Espoo, the place was already empty.

However, during his disappearance, he did not remain quiet for a single day, regularly posting on X, celebrating HEX's fourth anniversary, proclaiming the contract's "flawless operation," and casually listing Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, FTX's SBF, Terra's Do Kwon, and Three Arrows Capital's Su Zhu as part of a long list of people "who dislike Richard Heart and face either imprisonment or bankruptcy." The implication was that those who hate him do not have a good ending, while he roams freely.

As Finnish police issued a wanted notice for the empty house, he was living with his wife in a mansion by the Bosphorus Strait, surrounded by boxes of cash, luxury watches, firearms, and ammunition, and two drones.

Believers of HEX

The HEX community refers to themselves as Hexicans, a group with a unified dress color, magenta and orange. In August 2023, a documentary titled "The Highest of Stakes" premiered in Los Angeles, just three days after the SEC had filed its lawsuit against Heart. Hexicans still donned their support colors to fill the theater like attending a prom. Over one million dollars of the film's production budget came from community crypto donations, and it remained lukewarm for the first fifty days of fundraising until a wallet with over $300 million in holdings made a single donation of $450,000, prompting the project to move forward. Who this wallet belongs to is known to the community but remains unspoken.

Critic Eric Wall stated that Heart "really has read the books on how to build a cult," referring to "The 48 Laws of Power," as he almost followed every principle of self-deification, adorned with jewelry, claiming wealth from other sources. Heart repeatedly reminds critics that he raised $27 million for medical research, asserting that those who insult him only seek to tear down without building.

The reason this narrative is effective may be quite simple. Those who entered the market early indeed made money, and the staking mechanism made it hard for most to cut their losses; acknowledging the scam equates to admitting they were the last ones to buy in. When the 2025 SEC case was dismissed, Hexicans celebrated it as a complete vindication, despite the judge only addressing jurisdiction, not innocence.

Now that the founder is handcuffed in Istanbul, Hexicans on X are still flooding feeds, claiming this is persecution against open-source developers. HEX has dropped 99.5% from its high of $0.51 in September 2021. The code still runs on the chain, the story reaches its seventh year, and believers continue to believe. This is likely the "most expensive" faith in the crypto world.