{"id":11164650,"date":"2025-02-21T12:53:41","date_gmt":"2025-02-21T17:53:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/?p=11164650"},"modified":"2025-03-20T19:29:17","modified_gmt":"2025-03-20T23:29:17","slug":"justin-rieger-cryptocurrency-scams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/2025\/02\/21\/justin-rieger-cryptocurrency-scams\/","title":{"rendered":"Taneytown teacher who died by suicide linked to sophisticated cryptocurrency scams, analyst says"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Baltimore Sun has uncovered\u00a0seven cryptocurrency wallets and accounts belonging to the 22-year-old Taneytown substitute teacher who police say died this month by suicide<\/a> while he was being investigated for financial fraud and child sex abuse<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Justin Rieger tried a variety of cryptocurrencies throughout 2023, but emptied most of the wallets The Sun found into bitcoin and ethereum wallets by 2024. During that time,\u00a0investors\u00a0he had promised to make rich began to suspect that the Carroll County school coach and Christian youth group volunteer was running a massive and illegal investment scheme.<\/p>\n

The Sun also found three different bank accounts\u00a0<\/strong>Rieger directed investors to deposit money into.<\/p>\n

One cryptocurrency wallet The Sun found retained nearly $24,000 in cash. At least one of the wallets linked to Rieger was associated with a phishing scam, and his cryptocurrency footprint could be linked to two more scams involving digital currencies, according to a cryptocurrency analyst who reviewed Rieger’s trail at The Sun’s request.<\/p>\n

Investors The Sun spoke with accused Rieger of running a widespread “Ponzi scheme<\/a>,” in which he paid “returns” to early investors using funds from new investors, generating little \u2014 if any \u2014 actual income. The Sun’s investigation has thus far uncovered investors in six states who say they were defrauded.<\/p>\n

Investors from Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania provided bank, Venmo, PayPal and cryptocurrency transactions to The Sun for review and verification of their investments with Rieger. Together, they accounted for at least $400,000 invested with him; some began investing with him when he was just 18. They say other investors account for millions more invested with Rieger.<\/p>\n

The Sun reviewed financial records, contracts, emails and text messages to independently verify investors\u2019 involvement with Rieger.<\/p>\n

While some did get back the money they put in, far more lost all or the vast majority of the funds they gave Rieger. They fear it may be gone forever.<\/p>\n

The Carroll County Sheriff\u2019s Office confirmed Feb. 11 that Rieger is the focus of a financial fraud investigation as well as a child sex abuse investigation. However, none of the abuse took place in the school system, Carroll County Sheriff’s Office Major David Stem said.<\/p>\n

The sex abuse investigation will close due to Rieger\u2019s death. The financial fraud investigation is ongoing and detectives are still gathering evidence, Stem said. He asked anyone who believed themselves defrauded by Rieger to contact Det. Sean O’Meara at the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office.<\/p>\n

Investors The Sun spoke with said the loss of their funds was devastating. In some cases, it was the only money they had saved.<\/p>\n

“I put off things I could have done with that money,” said Mike Arbogast, a West Virginia-based small business owner who invested with Rieger. “Instead, I was trying to do something smart for our future.<\/p>\n

“Now, I think about all the opportunity that I\u2019ve lost,” he said. “The years I spent scrimping and saving and being frugal. It\u2019s just gone.”<\/p>\n

\u2018Where is the rest of it?\u2019<\/h4>\n

The $23,000 The Sun found sitting in one of Rieger’s wallets is \u201ca drop in the bucket,\u201d Arbogast said. \u201cWhere\u2019s the rest of it?\u201d<\/p>\n

Arbogast and his wife come from working-class families, he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have generational wealth or money coming out of our ears.\u201d <\/p>\n

Arbogast invested roughly $110,000 with Rieger, starting with a $50,000 investment in April 2023, according to documentation he provided for review. Arbogast had never invested with day traders before, and said he believed Rieger was trading on the stock market on his behalf \u2014 but he knew that a friend had seen big returns, and he hoped he would, too.<\/p>\n

“I\u2019d never written a check that big before,” Arbogast said.<\/p>\n

Two days later, Rieger posted on Facebook about his brand-new truck \u2014 one with custom work done at a local car dealer known for selling custom cars and trucks, Krietz Auto.<\/p>\n

Arbogast said he worried that he had just been taken for a ride \u2014 but his fears were quelled when two weeks later, Rieger texted Arbogast, saying he\u2019d \u201cjust passed $1,000 in profit.\u201d Arbogast provided screenshots and a screen recording of texts between the two for review.<\/p>\n

\u201cDefinitely a slower start than I wanted,\u201d Rieger prefaced the text with.<\/p>\n

Two weeks later, Rieger texted Arbogast again.<\/p>\n

\u201cWanted to update you that your balance is $54,210.12.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThanks for the update, Justin!\u201d Arbogast texted back. \u201cSounds like you\u2019re making some good progress.\u201d<\/p>\n

Four weeks later, Rieger texted Arbogast again.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey Mike!\u201d He wrote. \u201cJust crossed the $60,000 mark today!\u201d<\/p>\n

Rieger routinely pressured Arbogast to invest more and more with him, text messages between the two show. Every few weeks, Rieger would text Arbogast, asking him to set up monthly investments through Venmo.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith every update he gave, he was like\u00a0… ‘this would be a really great time if you\u2019ve got more money to dump in.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Arbogast tried sending Rieger a few thousand dollars through Venmo, but ultimately, decided against doing that regularly, texts show. Instead, Arbogast gave him another large chunk of money in the fall of 2023 \u2014 $40,000, per his bank statements.<\/p>\n

Arbogast never tried to withdraw the money he invested with Rieger, impressed, he said, by the high returns Rieger promised: 20% in a month, an astonishingly high percentage by any standard.<\/p>\n

Noted Ponzi scheme mastermind Bernie Madoff guaranteed investors returns on the S&P 500\u00a0of 10-20% a year, with an average return of 16.3%, Madoff told The Wall Street Journal in 1992.<\/p>\n

In contrast, the average return investors can expect to see on blue-chip stocks is between 7% and 10%.<\/p>\n

When Arbogast heard Rieger had died by suicide, he said his first thought was how terrible this was, what a tragedy.<\/p>\n

But soon, he realized he didn’t know how to access his money. Arbogast called Interactive Brokerage, the firm he believed Rieger was investing through, only to learn that Rieger was not a broker with them, and did not have an account under his name\u00a0or Arbogast\u2019s name.<\/p>\n

Interactive Brokers declined to comment on the record in response to The Sun asking if Rieger was or had been associated with their brokerage, and if so, how his investors could recover their funds.<\/p>\n

Arbogast doesn\u2019t know where the $110,000 he invested with Rieger is, he said, and he doesn\u2019t know if, or how, he\u2019ll get it back.<\/p>\n

Arbogast joined a private Facebook group created by and for people who had invested with Rieger and were looking for their money. He says 33 people are members of the group, and many say they invested more than $100,000 with Rieger.<\/p>\n

Joanna Floros, who also invested $25,000 with Rieger, according to receipts she provided to The Sun, had one question.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs the money frozen?\u201d she asked, wondering if it could be used to make some investors whole again.<\/p>\n

\"Joanna
Joanna Floros and her son Nikos Phelps, both of Central Pennsylvania, allege they are victims of financial fraud by Justin Rieger. (Kim Hairston\/Staff)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Expert: Rieger\u2019s transactions rife with \u2018hallmarks of crypto scams\u2019<\/h4>\n

Investors who sent money to Rieger\u2019s multiple cryptocurrency wallets provided a look into some of Rieger\u2019s online trading activities, in multiple cryptocurrencies including ethereum and bitcoin. While some wallets logged transactions in U.S. dollars, others logged them in different currencies or blocks, making it impossible to say how much Rieger kept in these wallets at any given time.<\/p>\n

The Sun found that at least one wallet Rieger directed investors to transfer money to had logged one trade as early as 2009, though it began seeing more frequent and higher-amount trades in 2016.<\/p>\n

It is unclear if Rieger or an adult opened the wallet on his behalf, as he would have been 7 years old at the time of its creation, yet it is evident he was using it regularly by 2021.<\/p>\n

Rieger\u2019s wallets were mostly dormant after receiving deposits, and largely emptied out. His bitcoin wallet The Sun found with more than $23,815.09 was still trading in small amounts as recently as Feb. 17, likely an “autotrade” Rieger set up before his death.<\/p>\n

The Sun provided Rieger’s wallet and account numbers to France-based cryptocurrency analyst and digital currency expert Courage Kimber for analysis.<\/p>\n

Kimber, a former management consultant, federal contractor and project manager for Fortune 500 companies, is a Web3 consultant, a decentralized version of the internet, and regularly privately consults as a cryptocurrency analyst and global strategist.<\/p>\n

After reviewing the account numbers of crypto wallets sent to her, Kimber told The Sun one of the transactions undertaken on cryptocurrency blockchain Polygon is clearly associated with a phishing scam and two others may also be suspect.<\/p>\n

Kimber analyzed records collected by reporters at the request of The Sun and linked to investor transactions with Rieger without knowing to whom the wallets belonged.<\/p>\n

Kimber said that when other cryptocurrency users interacted with the suspicious\u00a0string of transactions, \u201ctheir wallets were drained.\u201d It is unclear if those users were Rieger\u2019s local investors or other, unknown online traders.<\/p>\n

“The Polygon transaction … was associated with a phishing scam. It appears to be linked to an untrustworthy project token,” Kimber said.<\/p>\n

“There was a scam going around with the airdropping of NFTs and once users interacted with it their wallets were drained,” she said. “There was also a popular scam with USDC-NFT Voucher scam, where users would receive a NFT voucher and be directed to a website to claim the NFT voucher and it would request private key details to gain access to the user’s wallet. The other scam was the fake USDC swap.”<\/p>\n

Smart contracts are digital contracts that work automatically once the terms of the contract are met, while fake tokens trick users into handing over their financial details so scammers can empty their digital wallets.<\/p>\n

The wallets she reviewed also engaged in trading activity that appeared to swap U.S. stable coins for assets with no value, Kimber found.<\/p>\n

Cryptocurrency investment schemes rife with abuse<\/h4>\n

Experts said that for regular investors, much of the cryptocurrency world can be confusing or opaque, making it ripe for scams and abuse.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis really goes back to the combination of the hype and confusion around cryptocurrency as a whole,\u201d said Mason Wilder, research director of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.