Here's how a Pensacola police detective uncovered an international cryptocurrency scheme:

The Pensacola Police Department recognized a detective as 2022 Officer of the Year for working more than 200 cases, including cracking an international cryptocurrency scheme.

The PPD announced Feb. 14 that Detective Joseph Taschetta, 29, earned the award after he managed to solve a case involving someone from India calling an elderly woman in Pensacola and convincing her to transfer all her money into Bitcoin to expunge a fake outstanding warrant.

In April 2022, Taschetta said a man from India began impersonating a law enforcement agent. He told the woman she had outstanding warrants and needed to withdraw $10,000 dollars from her account and deposit it into a cryptocurrency wallet.

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“It started with a mere $10,000, which wiped her out completely,” he said, recalling the case. “We can actually trace a lot of this stuff back. I was able to trace it and found this money was moving to (crypto) exchanges and started my freeze orders.”

After “a day or two,” Taschetta was able to freeze all the money the woman sent via crypto transaction, but after doing some more digging into the wallet the woman sent her money through, Taschetta discovered the larger scheme.

“I have a $10,000 victim, tracked money into this wallet, got the wallet frozen and it turns out this wallet had half a million dollars sitting in it,” Taschetta said. “I’m like, ‘That’s bizarre. I wonder how many more victims are getting scammed?’”

That’s when he took the crypto wallet address and ran it through PPD’s software database, locating victims in Ohio, Louisiana, Texas and South Florida who were scammed from the same person in India.

“There were multiple victims across the United States that had that same (crypto) wallet tied to this narrative that the officers put in,” he said. “Then I read in each one of those reports from each of those officers and detectives that investigated those, and they inactivated the case because they didn’t understand, they didn’t know where it went.”

Taschetta said he turned over the larger case to the United States Secret Service, since his jurisdiction ends at the Pensacola city limits, but said he was informed that all the victims in this case would receive their funds back, including the woman in Pensacola.

“I refer to my cases like a thread in your shirt, you know,” he said. “You pull on it, you pull on it and eventually you’ll unravel whatever you need to unravel and it’s there, and I just keep tugging.”

Taschetta said most of his strategy to return his victim’s money came from a case he worked in April 2021 where a Nigerian scammer intercepted a mortgage email and transferred it into cryptocurrency.

The scammer managed to intercept an email between a title company and the prospective homeowner, telling the homeowner to wire $250,000 to their account. The scammer then transferred the money to multiple cryptocurrency wallets.

“I traced it all. I was able to locate it still pending in the account, and I called everybody,” Taschetta said. “I eventually made it to the security division and was able to freeze all but $50,000 of their money.”

After freezing the money, Taschetta then had to figure out how to move the money back to the victim. He then reached out to the FBI, but the case didn’t meet the bureau’s “threshold” to help with the case.

“Finally, one of the other detectives is like, ‘Hey, try the Secret Service,’” Taschetta said. “I met this great contact at Secret Service out of Tallahassee and he put us in contact with an agent who was able to do a seizure order, recovered the money and dispersed it back to the victim.”

A few months after Taschetta closed that case, he said a Secret Service agent based in Georgia called him to say the Nigerian man who stole his victim’s money was arrested after he entered the United States.

“He ended up having all the debit cards and all that stuff on him when he flew into the United States,” Taschetta said. “So, that case started basically how we trace, track and freeze (crypto) funds.”

Although both cases were assigned to him, Taschetta made sure to pass the credit around where it was due, saying none of his work could be done without help — especially from his supervisor, Sgt. Chris Grantham.

“Just because I’m Officer of the Year doesn’t mean that it’s me. It’s my team,” he said. “I give credit to my team and credit to my supervisor because he’s been the one that I go to for everything.

“I gotta give it where it’s owed, you know? You can’t forget where you came from,” Taschetta added. “I started out as a ‘plain-Jane' officer with no experience whatsoever, and I’ve grown into this officer because (Grantham) helps push.”

Even if Taschetta’s name is on the case, he said he doesn’t care who gets the credit as long as “bad people get put away.”

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: PPD detective Joseph Taschetta is Officer of Year, cracks crypto scam