Interpol Finally Catches HEX Founder Richard Heart Hiding in Istanbul

Richard Heart spent two years posting from undisclosed locations while Interpol hunted him for Finnish tax fraud. Turkish intelligence found him anyway, in an apartment in Beşiktaş, with $4 million in cash and 64 watches.

Turkish police and the country's national intelligence agency, MİT, raided a residence in Istanbul's Beşiktaş district on October 14 and detained Richard James Schueler, the man known across crypto as Richard Heart. He's the founder of HEX, the blockchain PulseChain and the exchange PulseX. According to Turkish media reports relayed by CoinDesk and The Block, the operation ran on an Interpol Red Notice that Finland had requested back in December 2024. Heart had been evading it for nearly two years.

The haul from the apartment reads like a rap sheet of its own: $4 million in cash, a dozen phones and laptops, 64 luxury watches, drones, firearms, and six cold wallets, according to a KuCoin news report that put the cash and wallet figure at roughly $7.15 million combined. Reports also indicate Heart's wife was detained in the same raid. None of this fits the profile of a man quietly waiting out a legal dispute. It fits a man who built his entire public persona around flaunting the kind of wealth crypto makes possible, then found himself running from the consequences.

The Red Notice traces back to a Finnish investigation into aggravated tax fraud, covering alleged unpaid taxes on income from June 2020 through April 2024. Finnish authorities have said the suspected sum could run into the hundreds of millions of euros. A separate assault charge is attached to the same warrant: Europol's most-wanted listing accuses Heart of knocking a 16-year-old to the ground and punching them repeatedly. Finland issued the original remand order in September 2024, and Interpol's Red Notice followed three months later. Heart, never one to go quiet during a legal fight, kept posting publicly throughout the following months, treating the notice as one more obstacle to brush off rather than a reason to lower his profile.

That bravado is worth sitting with for a second, because it's the whole Richard Heart playbook in one sentence. He built HEX by promising obscene returns and backed it up with a public image built on diamonds, watches and a self-funded "Enigma" stone he reportedly spent millions on. Being wanted by Interpol became just another flex.

The SEC case is a different story, and already closed

It's worth separating this from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's case against Heart, which is unrelated and already over. The SEC charged Heart, HEX, PulseChain and PulseX in 2023, accusing him of raising more than $1 billion through unregistered securities offerings and misappropriating at least $12 million of investor money. A federal judge dismissed that complaint in February 2025, ruling the SEC lacked jurisdiction because Heart's conduct wasn't clearly aimed at U.S. investors. The agency let its deadline to file an amended complaint pass in April, closing the matter for good. Heart treated it as vindication. The Finnish case was always the real threat, and it's the one that just caught up with him.

The market didn't wait for a verdict

Crypto markets rendered their own verdict within hours. HEX fell by nearly 60%, sliding from around $0.00226 to a low near $0.0009. PulseX dropped 49%, and PulseChain's native PLS token lost close to 36%, according to figures reported by CryptoSlate and French outlet Cryptoast. For tokens whose value has always rested almost entirely on one man's promotional energy and public credibility, that reaction makes sense. There's no CEO succession plan for a coin whose entire pitch was Richard Heart himself.

What happens next runs through Turkish courts. Extradition to Finland isn't automatic, and Heart, an American citizen, has every incentive to fight it with the same combativeness he's shown regulators for years. Turkey has no bilateral extradition treaty obligation that makes this quick, and legal fights like this routinely stretch past a year. For now, the cash is seized, the watches are in an evidence locker, and the man who once said nothing could stop his idea is sitting in Turkish custody waiting to find out if that's still true.

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