Banking is the hidden fault line beneath nearly every cryptocurrency company. Customers see the technology. Founders live with the knowledge that a single account closure, compliance decision, or failed banking relationship can threaten years of work overnight.

By the time I met David Levine, I had spent years building Crypto Dispensers through that uncertainty. I understood the difficulty of earning institutional trust in an industry that many banks regarded with suspicion. I also understood the value of a credible person who could make the right introduction at the right moment.

Our earliest surviving correspondence dates to October 2022. By early 2023, Levine was presenting himself as someone who could open doors that had remained closed to companies like mine. He described himself as working in strategic development for Freeda Inc. He spoke the language of compliance and institutional finance. He introduced Crypto Dispensers to prospective banking, legal, technology, and financial relationships. He connected me with Prime Trust, a lawyer who was supposed to help secure a BankProv account, people at Google, and parties discussing the possible acquisition of hundreds of cryptocurrency kiosks.

The introductions did not arrive as a single extravagant promise. They arrived one at a time, each appearing to authenticate the last. A name led to a conversation. A conversation led to a document. A document led to another person whose title and institution seemed to make the network more credible.

That is how trust was built. Not suddenly, but cumulatively.

Levine came to look less like a person selling access and more like a person who belonged inside the world he claimed to understand. In the precarious banking environment surrounding cryptocurrency, that distinction carried enormous weight. A person who appeared capable of solving the industry's hardest problem could begin to look less like a consultant and more like a lifeline.

That was the position from which I trusted David Levine. It was also the position from which I believe he deceived me.

Fraud rarely succeeds by looking like fraud. It succeeds by borrowing the appearance of legitimacy.

Beginning in the spring of 2023, Levine told me that Freeda had access to a banking relationship involving Mercury and Choice Financial Group. The communications surrounding that relationship looked institutional. They carried names, titles, logos, signatures, and domains that appeared to belong to lawyers, compliance officers, bank executives, and exchange employees.

In the complaint I later submitted to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, I identified the people who had been presented to me. They included a purported lawyer named Yohan Lee, a supposed Choice Financial representative named Megan Hill-Glover, a supposed Mercury compliance employee named JB Kim, a supposed Choice Financial executive named Alexander Bell, and a supposed OKCoin representative named Pablo Margo.

The appearance of legitimacy accumulated over months. Conversations produced documents. Documents supported introductions. Introductions produced explanations that seemed to confirm the larger story. No single piece had to carry the entire deception I believe occurred because every piece appeared to reinforce the others.

During that period, Crypto Dispensers moved substantial funds. In my IC3 complaint, I reported approximately $150,000 in ACH transfers made from our Green Dot Bank account between April and July 2023. I also reported a separate $60,000 wire that had been represented as necessary for a savings account connected to our cryptocurrency operations. Later communications used different figures when discussing principal, proposed settlements, and broader business losses. The precise reconciliation belongs in the banking and legal records. The essential point does not: the exposure was substantial, and the harm did not end with the transfers.

The company paid in legal fees, management time, damaged banking relationships, and lost opportunity. Attention that should have gone toward customers and growth was redirected toward understanding what had happened and trying to contain it. This unfolded while Crypto Dispensers was already carrying the ordinary pressures of the cryptocurrency industry: compliance scrutiny, unstable vendors, account closures, and the recurring burden of proving that a lawful business deserved access to basic financial infrastructure.

Money can be counted. The years of distraction, anxiety, and diverted effort are harder to measure, but they were part of the loss too.

The truth entered through an ordinary act of verification. We stopped relying on the contacts Levine had placed before us and reached the real institution directly.

Authentic Mercury support told us that two domains used by the purported Mercury and Choice representatives were not genuine. Mercury explained that its communications came from its official domain and that Choice Financial used a different official banking domain. It urged us to file a police report and dispute the transactions with our bank.

With that response, the entire structure changed shape. The logos no longer inspired confidence. The signatures no longer looked official. The people who had supposedly been guiding us through banking and compliance no longer appeared to represent the institutions whose names they had used.

What had looked like an institutional network now looked, to me, like an architecture of impersonation.

On September 22, 2023, after the situation began to unravel, Levine wrote to me and my lawyers. He said an investigation had been conducted, said his side understood what had happened, accepted "full responsibility," apologized, and said repayments would begin the following Monday.

The next day, he took a different position in a message to my lawyer. He denied involvement in fraudulent activity and said Freeda was also a victim.

Those two positions never sat comfortably together. Levine denied theft and denied committing financial crimes. Yet he continued to discuss responsibility, repayment, settlement terms, and money he said would be returned. His words moved between denial and obligation, between claiming innocence and negotiating the consequences of what had happened.

One question remained: if no money had been wrongfully taken from my company, why was there a balance to repay?

On September 25, 2023, I filed a complaint through IC3.gov, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. I identified Virtual Assets LLC, doing business as Crypto Dispensers, as the victim business. I supplied the names, companies, transfers, recipient information, email addresses, and chronology available to me. I described what I believed was an extended fraud involving impersonated identities and false banking communications.

I was not asking the government to settle a private disagreement for me. I was reporting conduct that I believed crossed into criminal territory.

I preserved the communications. I contacted the real bank. I worked with counsel. I attempted recalls and disputes. I documented the transfers. I gave the federal government names, dates, domains, financial institutions, and a financial trail that could be followed.

This was what a compliant company was supposed to do when it encountered suspected criminal conduct. We did not bury the problem or conceal the transactions. We assembled the record and carried it to the authorities.

Then we waited for the authorities to tell us what came next.

On November 29, 2023, more than two months after I filed the IC3 complaint, Special Agent Nick Schlereth of the United States Secret Service's Chicago Field Office contacted me.

He identified himself as a member of the Cyber Fraud Task Force and the office's cryptocurrency subject-matter expert. He said my complaint concerning David Levine had been forwarded to him. He wanted to meet, understand the incident, and learn more about my business.

My lawyer, Michael Frisch, explained that he had worked through the matter with me, had communicated with Levine many times, and had documents ready to provide. Agent Schlereth preferred an in-person meeting because he wanted to speak directly with the victim. My lawyer confirmed that we would both attend, and the meeting was arranged.

For a brief moment, the complaint no longer felt as if it were sitting inside a system. It had reached a person. The person had relevant expertise. He understood that cryptocurrency was involved, identified me as the victim, and wanted the evidence.

It felt like the beginning of accountability.

Instead, it became the last clear point of contact.

I received no written status update, no later request for additional records, no notice of recovered funds, no referral, no charging decision, and no closure letter. I do not claim to know what the Secret Service did internally. Investigators can review information without revealing every step, and no victim is entitled to direct an investigation. But from my side of the process, the complaint simply disappeared from view.

There was no explanation of what became of it. There was only silence.

For a victim, silence is not neutral. At first, it feels temporary. Then months pass. Then years. Eventually, the absence of an answer becomes the only answer the system has given.

While the federal channel went quiet, the private effort to recover the money remained painfully active.

In December 2023, Levine continued discussing transfers and repayment. In February 2024, he wrote that he had not stolen from me, said he did not have the money to pay and had needed to take a loan, and asked for more time. In that same chain, he discussed sending the $150,000 principal and proposed a broader $500,000 settlement under confidentiality and legal-protection terms.

I do not present those negotiations as an admission of criminal liability. I present them because they expose the unresolved contradiction at the center of this story. Levine denied wrongdoing while negotiating the return of money, proposing settlement figures, and discussing the damage that needed to be resolved.

The promises kept moving just beyond reach. A payment would arrive by a certain date, and then the date would change. The money would come in tranches, and then another explanation would appear. The correspondence moved through exchange delays, loans, lawyers, escrow, commissions, Bitcoin, USDT, ACH transfers, and banking timelines. Every explanation seemed to produce another delay. Every promised ending became the beginning of another round of waiting.

Some partial payments were made. In February 2024, Levine wrote that he had sent $2,000 and would send another $500. In May, he asked for the remaining balance after another $4,000 payment. In June, he promised to send $5,000 several times during the following week and to continue making weekly payments. These were not conversations about an obligation I had invented. Levine himself discussed prior payments, future installments, and the amount still owed.

The promised resolution never arrived on the timetable he repeatedly gave me. By January 2026, I was still asking whether he intended to resume paying the balance.

I considered filing a civil lawsuit. My lawyers advised me that the economics did not make sense. Litigation would be expensive, and a judgment would be worth little if Levine did not have assets that could actually be found and collected. A court could declare that I was owed money, but a declaration is not recovery. I could spend more money winning on paper and still receive nothing.

That left me between two doors. Behind one was a government process that had stopped communicating. Behind the other was a private lawsuit that could deepen the loss without producing a meaningful recovery.

This is what institutional silence transfers to a victim. The victim becomes the investigator, archivist, collection department, and litigation funder. The victim hires lawyers, preserves evidence, traces payments, drafts demands, negotiates settlements, and follows up year after year. The original injury does not remain in the past. It keeps billing the person who suffered it.

I believe David Levine scammed me and my company. I do not base that conclusion on one angry exchange, a failed business arrangement, or the clarity that hindsight can falsely provide. I base it on the chronology and the contemporaneous record.

The record shows how Levine gained my trust by offering access to banking and institutional relationships. It shows that people presented as representatives of real financial institutions used official-looking communications. It shows that authentic Mercury support later said key domains were not genuine. It shows that I filed an IC3 complaint on September 25, 2023. It shows that a Secret Service agent received the complaint, identified me as the victim, and arranged to meet with me and my lawyer.

The record also preserves Levine's conflicting positions. He denied stealing from me and denied committing financial crimes. He also accepted responsibility for the situation, apologized, promised repayments, discussed settlement figures, acknowledged partial payments, and asked what balance remained.

Those facts do not allow me to announce a criminal verdict. Only a court can do that. They do allow me to describe what happened to my company, what I reported, and why I reached the conclusion I did.

What the record does not reveal is what the government did after contacting me. I do not know whether an internal report was completed, whether another office reviewed the matter, whether a prosecutor considered it, or whether the complaint was deprioritized. No agency communicated an outcome to me.

That unknown is not a footnote. It is the void at the center of this experience.

The first injury took money. The second took faith.

The United States tells victims of cyber fraud to report quickly, preserve evidence, cooperate with investigators, and trust the process. I followed those instructions. My lawyer was prepared with documents. The transfers were traceable. The institutions whose identities had allegedly been impersonated were identifiable. The communications were preserved. The conduct I reported touched banking, digital assets, interstate communications, and identity impersonation, all areas the federal government publicly describes as serious concerns.

A complaint number is not accountability. A meeting is not a resolution. A file reaching an agent is not the same as the evidence reaching a conclusion.

That conclusion does not have to be the one a victim wants. It may be a prosecution, a recovery effort, a referral, a determination that the evidence does not satisfy a charging standard, or a formal decision not to proceed. Any of those outcomes would at least show that the evidence had been evaluated and the process had reached an end.

Indefinite silence does something different. It leaves the burden where the crime began, on the person who says he was harmed.

I understand that investigators have limited resources. I understand that not every complaint becomes a criminal case and that reporting suspected criminal conduct does not prove it occurred. My belief is not a judicial finding. Those principles are essential to fairness. They do not, however, erase the government's responsibility to treat a reporting victim as more than the source of an intake file.

When no visible resolution arrives, the person who lost the money must carry both the loss and the uncertainty. The accused person can deny, promise, negotiate, and delay. The victim pays the lawyers, maintains the evidence, and watches time consume the possibility of recovery.

The financial loss happened once. The institutional injury renews itself every time another request for an answer receives none.

Two timelines now sit beside each other.

In the first, Crypto Dispensers went to the federal government in 2023 as a victim business. We reported what we believed was an organized fraud. We preserved the communications, documented the transfers, identified the institutions and people involved, worked through counsel, and made ourselves available to investigators. We did not hide from scrutiny. We invited it.

In the second, on November 18, 2025, the United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois announced that a federal grand jury had indicted me and Virtual Assets LLC on one count of money laundering conspiracy. The indictment alleges that I knowingly allowed criminals to use Crypto Dispensers to launder at least $10 million in proceeds from wire fraud and narcotics offenses. My company and I pleaded not guilty. An indictment is an allegation, not evidence of guilt. I am presumed innocent unless the government proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

The public record now assigns me two starkly different roles: the founder who went to federal law enforcement asking for help, and the defendant against whom the federal government has brought its power.

It would be intellectually dishonest to argue that reporting one suspected crime proves a person could never commit another. It does not. People accused of crimes can also be victims, and the Levine complaint cannot substitute for evidence in my criminal case.

But conduct matters. When Crypto Dispensers believed something unlawful had happened, we documented it, followed compliance procedures, involved counsel, and went to federal law enforcement. We behaved like a company that expected the rules to protect it because we believed we had followed them.

Two years later, the government publicly accused me and my company of money laundering. Yet it had never told me whether the conduct we reported was investigated, rejected, referred, or forgotten. The government that urges private citizens and companies to report suspicious conduct offered no visible resolution when we did exactly that.

That contradiction does not decide my criminal case, and I do not ask it to. It belongs in the story because it reveals the full relationship between my company and the government. We approached the system openly as a victim. The system answered briefly, went silent, and later returned in the most powerful form it possesses, not with help, but with an indictment.

Silence does not erase a story. Sometimes silence becomes its most important fact.

I am not writing this essay as a substitute for a courtroom. I am writing because a documented experience should not disappear simply because the process surrounding it never produced a visible conclusion.

This episode changed the way I understand trust. I learned that institutional language can be copied, professional identities can be imitated, and a convincing network of introductions can be assembled around a story that is not true. I learned that a founder's most urgent need can become the precise point through which someone gains leverage. I learned that reporting suspected fraud can mark the beginning of a government process, or the final moment at which the system speaks to the victim at all.

Most painfully, I learned that accountability can depend less on the strength of the record than on whether the victim has enough money, time, and endurance to pursue it alone.

I reported what I believed was a crime. I preserved the evidence. A federal agent contacted me and identified me as the victim. David Levine denied stealing from me, but he also accepted responsibility for the situation and spent months discussing repayment and settlement.

The government did not give me an answer. My lawyers told me that civil litigation could cost more than it recovered. The balance remained. So did the unanswered questions.

Before the government called me a defendant, I had gone to federal law enforcement as a founder asking for help. That fact does not establish my innocence, and it does not determine the outcome of the case against me. It does establish something about the chronology, the posture of my company, and the faith I once placed in the system.

I went to the government because I believed a compliant business should report suspected crime. I went because I believed preserving evidence mattered. I went because I believed the institutions charged with investigating fraud would examine the record and tell us, one way or another, what justice required.

I am still waiting for that answer.