Richard Heart Detained in Istanbul. Finland's Interpol Request Did What the SEC Hasn't.
HEX and PulseChain founder Richard Heart was picked up in a Beşiktaş police operation tied to a Finnish Interpol Red Notice, with electronic devices seized. No charges have been filed in Turkey yet. Here's why a Red Notice moved faster than the SEC's 2023 case ever did.
Richard Heart, the founder of HEX and PulseChain, was detained in Istanbul during a police operation in the Beşiktaş district. The arrest traces back to an Interpol Red Notice requested by Finland, and officers reportedly seized his electronic devices. No formal charges have been filed in Turkey. That last part is where this gets interesting.
A Red Notice isn't a warrant. It's a request, and every country decides how seriously to take it. Finland asked. Turkey acted. That sequence tells you more about cross-border crypto enforcement than any white paper on the subject.
Heart has been a target in Europe for a while. Finnish authorities opened an investigation into tax fraud and assault allegations, which is what sits behind the Interpol request. Separately, the SEC sued him in 2023 over HEX, PulseChain, and PulseX, accusing him of selling unregistered securities and misappropriating at least $12 million in investor funds. He's denied the claims. The US case has crawled along for over a year. The Red Notice route didn't.
Harmonization sounds clean. The reality is 27 national interpretations, and sometimes a request from one EU capital does what a regulatory filing from another can't. Brussels can spend 18 months on a delegated act. A police van in Beşiktaş works on a different clock.
For anyone holding HEX or PulseChain tokens, this is a reputational hit before it's a legal one. Neither asset trades on major EU venues, so MiCA passporting requirements barely brush against them. And that's the uncomfortable part. A founder can be detained on an Interpol warrant while the tokens tied to him sit outside the perimeter that CASPs are required to police. Supervisory convergence hasn't caught up to that gap yet.
Watch whether Turkey extradites. If it does, Finland's criminal case becomes the template, and every exchange with EU operations should be checking how it onboarded these tokens in the first place.