PPD Detective Joseph Taschetta is Officer of the Year, cracking crypto scams
Pensacola police recognized a detective as the 2022 Officer of the Year for working on more than 200 cases, including busting an international cryptocurrency scheme.
PPD announced on February 14 that Detective Joseph Taschetta, 29, received the award after he was able to solve a case involving someone from India who called an elderly woman in Pensacola and convinced her to transfer all her money to Bitcoin to delete a fake outstanding arrest warrant.
In April 2022, Taschetta said a man from India began posing as a police 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 just $10,000, which completely wiped her out,” he said, recalling the case. “We can actually trace a lot of this back. I was able to trace it and found that this money moved 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 digging a little more into the wallet the woman sent her money through, Taschetta discovered the larger scheme.
“I have a victim of $10,000, traced money into this wallet, had the wallet frozen and it turned out this wallet had half a million dollars in it,” Taschetta said. “I’m thinking, ‘That’s strange.’ I wonder how many more victims are being defrauded?'”
That’s when he took the crypto wallet address and ran it through PPD’s software database, finding victims in Ohio, Louisiana, Texas and South Florida who were defrauded from the same person in India.
“There were multiple victims across the United States who had the same (crypto) wallet associated with this narrative that the officers put in,” he said. “Then I read in every one of those reports from every one of those officers and detectives that investigated them, and they deactivated the case because they didn’t understand, they didn’t know where it went.”
Taschetta said he turned the larger case over to the United States Secret Service, since his jurisdiction ends at Pensacola’s city limits, but said he was informed that all the victims in this case would get their money back, including the Pensacola woman.
“I refer to my cases as a thread in your shirt, you know,” he said. “You pull it, you pull it and eventually you’ll unravel what you need to unravel and it’s there, and I just keep pulling.”
Taschetta said most of his strategy for returning his victim’s money came from a case he worked on in April 2021 where a Nigerian fraudster intercepted a mortgage email and transferred it to cryptocurrency.
The scammer managed to intercept an email between a title company and the prospective homeowner, asking the homeowner to wire $250,000 into their account. The fraudster then transferred the money to several cryptocurrency wallets.
“I tracked it all down. I was able to find whoever was still on the account and I called everyone,” Taschetta said. “I finally got to the security department and was able to freeze all but $50,000 of their money.”
After freezing the money, Taschetta had to figure out how to move the money back to the victim. He then approached the FBI, but the case did not meet the agency’s “threshold” to help with the case.
“Finally, one of the other investigators is like, ‘Hey, try the Secret Service,'” Taschetta said. “I met this great Secret Service contact outside of Tallahassee, and he put us in touch with an agent who was able to made a seizure order, retrieved the money and spread 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 the 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 basically started how we track, trace and freeze (crypto) funds.”
Although both cases were awarded to him, Taschetta made sure to give credit 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 it’s me. It’s my team, he said. “I give credit to my team and credit to my supervisor because he’s been my go-to for everything.
“I have to give it where it’s due, you know? You can’t forget where you came from,” Taschetta added. “I started as a ‘plain-Jane’ officer with no experience whatsoever, and I’ve grown into this officer because (Grantham) helps push.”
Although Taschetta’s name is on the case, he said he doesn’t care who gets the credit as long as “bad people are put away.”
