In July 2025, a Chinese national was arrested as he arrived at a house in Belleville, Illinois, to pick up gold. The house belonged to a man who had lost an estimated $2.5 million to an online investment scam. The courier, Shenghan Jin, has now been sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for his part in a scheme that, in the government’s account, cost the Belleville man about $2.5 million.
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An online friendship that began in May 2024
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Illinois, which announced the sentence, laid out the case in an October 7 release. Co-conspirators who have not been charged contacted the victim online in May 2024, built up his trust and then talked with him about investment strategies and opportunities. They told him to wire money to fake accounts and to buy gold bars.
The victim lost an estimated $2.5 million, including his life savings, through cryptocurrency, wire transfers and physical gold. Jin, a Chinese national, was the person sent to collect the gold. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of wire fraud, and a district judge imposed 27 months.
How an investment pitch finds a stranger
The question this case leaves for any household is how a person with savings gets chosen for a friendly online approach that turns into an investment pitch. The release says only that the contact began online, and it does not say how the co-conspirators found the victim or where they got his details.
What can be done on the household’s side is to shrink the number of places where a name, an address and a phone number are listed for anyone to find. Those details are what data brokers and people-search sites collect, and Incogni sends removal requests to those sites for a person and keeps re-sending them.
What happens to Jin after prison
Jin, 27, came to the United States on a student visa that expired in 2022. U.S. Attorney Steven D. Weinhoeft said that once Jin finishes “his well-deserved prison sentence, he will be immediately deported.” Weinhoeft also criticized Jin for remaining in the country after his visa expired and for helping defraud the victim. IRS Criminal Investigation and the U.S. Secret Service investigated, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathleen Howard prosecuted.
William Steenson, the special agent in charge of IRS Criminal Investigation’s Kansas City field office, said that anyone who uses lies and tricks to lure seniors into phony investments deserves prison. The release does not give the victim’s age, and Steenson’s comment is a general statement about this kind of scam rather than a description of the Belleville man.
Spotting a stranger’s investment pitch before any money moves
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Learn and Protect page lists the warning signs. The CFTC says there is no such thing as a risk-free trade or investment, and that anyone who feels rushed, anxious or pressured should stop and talk to someone trusted. It tells investors to deal only with entities registered with the CFTC or other federal or state regulators, and to report fraud to the government and to the digital asset exchange or social media site involved.
The CFTC’s checklist of warning signs is short and concrete: the person or firm is not registered with the CFTC, the website gives no physical headquarters address or customer service number, or the solicitations are full of grammatical and spelling errors. Registration is the first item on that list.
For a loss that has already happened, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov and the FTC’s ReportFraud.ftc.gov are the places to file. The record to keep is simple, and investigators will want all of it: the date of each wire and each gold purchase, the account details that were given, every message from the person who made the pitch, and any name, phone number or website the person used.
Weinhoeft’s statement frames the sentence as the end of Jin’s time in the United States, but the release says nothing about the co-conspirators who first contacted the victim. They remain uncharged, so the people who built the relationship online are not part of this sentence.
An approach that started with a stranger online
Nothing in the Illinois case says how the co-conspirators found the Belleville man, but the contact that cost him an estimated $2.5 million began with an online approach by co-conspirators. Incogni asks data brokers and people-search sites to remove personal information, sends removal requests on a person’s behalf and keeps re-sending them. Less personal data on broker lists can mean fewer scam calls, texts and emails.
Take your contact details off people-search sites with Incogni →
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
