Brian Oliver hefted the cardboard box and stepped out of his Gainesville condo with a second-story view of Bivens Arm.  

He walked down the staircase and out the building’s front door, down the brick sidewalk and into the parking lot. It was the middle of the afternoon, and a black Ford Mustang was waiting.  

Oliver, 84, handed the driver the cardboard box with 68 gold coins and walked back inside. The coins were worth $198,560. Oliver was embroiled in a fraud scheme.  

A week later, the black Mustang returned to Oliver’s complex, but this time the Gainesville Police Department (GPD) was waiting and arrested Atharva Sathawane, a 22-year-old from Tampa. 

Oliver realized the scheme after handing over the first cardboard box. 

“What I like to say is, I came out from under the ether at that point,” Oliver told Mainstreet. “My first impulse was to call these two guys and cuss them out, but instead I called the police.” 

A GPD detective set up the sting, using fake photos of gold coins to make it seem like Oliver was still hooked.  

Sathawane stood trial earlier this month at Gainesville’s federal courthouse. His arrest happened in February.  

The jury found him guilty of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and to commit money laundering. His sentencing is scheduled for December. 

Prosecutors said Sathawane helped try to defraud 30 victims of $7 million in gold and cash. According to the indictment, these cases occurred in the roughly four and a half months before Sathawane’s arrest.  

The indictment claimed that Sathawane knowingly traveled to pick up fraud payments and conspired with his partners through electronic communications. 

Sathawane pleaded not guilty. His attorney argued that Sathawane wasn’t told why he was picking up the boxes of gold and cash. They said Sathawane thought he was working with jewelry stores. 

After the jury trial, his lawyers filed an acquittal and asked the court to overturn the verdict. The federal prosecutors, according to the acquittal, failed to present sufficient proof that Sathawane knew the general purpose or nature of the conspiracy and knowingly entered an agreement to do it.    

Det. Sgt. Nick Ferrara oversees financial crimes for GPD. He’s been in the post for 10 years and said large fraud transactions happen even in Gainesville, with individuals schemed out of multiple six figure dollar amounts.  

“Every single group is affected, whether it’s students, foreign and ones that are local, elderly people, educated people, people that are not educated,” Ferrara said. “The common denominator is it’s somebody that has money.” 

The FBI reported a 46% increase in fraud complaints from 2023 to 2024 along with a 43% increase in losses from those complaints. The elderly population is often targeted, meaning Florida sees a high number of those cases. 

Ferrara said victims in Gainesville have fallen hard for fraud. In one case, a man met multiple times with couriers, identifying as law enforcement, in areas without surveillance cameras and paid more than $600,000 in gold over the course of three weeks.  

The cases, Ferrara said, keep piling up. Virtual transactions and cryptocurrency can be tough to track, and couriers get used to shield the organizers.  

Fraud victims sometimes harm their own cases by deleting or losing critical information, like the wallet ID where they sent the cryptocurrency. Without those details, Ferrara said GPD is stuck.   

He said it’s hard to prioritize cases and inevitably move some fraud victims further down the list. But he said patrol duties, like responding to assault or threats, naturally have priority for staffing. And the case numbers keep mounting 

Ferrara’s department has four staffers, including himself. It’s spread thin as GPD works to boost its ranks.  

GPD Chief Nelson Moya told the Gainesville City Commission the same in August as the city settled its budget for the next fiscal year.  

“I’ve told y’all of the dozens of cases held by each detective,” Moya said. “I’ve told y’all the hundreds of cases that come in that are fraud related that we can’t touch. We triage that and barely hang on.”  

Moya pushed for the City Commission to keep nine officer positions unfrozen and available to be filled for the next year. He said the department planned on hiring enough officers to fill all 27 budgeted vacancies by October. 

The commission decided to keep five of the positions unfrozen along with positions from other parts of the city. The City Commission recently raised the base salary for GPD officers to $60,000, an increase of nearly $10,000, after hitting critical staffing levels after the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In 2017, Moya said GPD had 311 full-time employees compared to 280 now.     

Oliver moved to Gainesville two years ago. He wanted to be close to UF Health because of health problems. Before Gainesville, he moved all over—West Palm Beach, Pensacola, Ocklawaha and Cocoa Beach. He lived on his sailboat for a while before transitioning to an RV.   

The scam started with a phone call. The caller said Oliver was owed a refund. In the process of receiving the refund, the fraud organizers said they accidentally overfunded the account.  

Oliver was transferred to a fake employee of Bank of America. The employee said that he needed to withdraw the money and buy gold to make the payment in order to avoid taxes.  

Oliver complied with the instructions.  

He said everything he went through put him in the hospital the month after the scam. He also came out of retirement to get a part-time job driving cars across the state for dealerships.  

At trial, Oliver said elderly victims from Boca Raton, Jacksonville, Fort Myers and even outside of Florida testified about the fraud schemes and Sathawane as the courier. 

“I’m listening to this, and I’m getting pissed, to be honest with you, because I know this is still going on today,” Oliver said. “Several of these people said that this fellow picked up from them, but there are other couriers also. So these other couriers are still doing this.” 

Federal prosecutors, led by Assistant Attorney Adam Hapner, refuted the acquittal filed by Sathawane’s lawyers.  

In a response, Hapner said electronic evidence showed him watching and sending videos of fraud couriers getting arrested, calling off a pickup because of a nearby cops, obeying instructions to delete messages and switching phone numbers to communicate. 

The prosecution also pointed to a time a concerned citizen directly confronted Sathawane and prevented an elderly victim from turning over $1 million in gold. The citizen directly called Sathawane a “scammer.”  

Sathawane knew the extremely shady circumstances surrounding the fraud schemes, the prosecution said. 

Ferrara said people need to think critically whenever they receive an unsolicited call, especially concerning money. He said residents should always look up the phone numbers for banks and not get rushed into action.  

One scheme involves someone pretending to be law enforcement calling about a warrant for arrest. The warrant requires a large money transaction to go away.  

That’s not how law enforcement operates, Ferrara emphasized. People need to think about if they’re conducting business in a normal way, like paying for official transactions with gift cards.  

“I thought I was not gullible enough to get involved in this,” Oliver said. “Obviously, I was. And all these other people were gullible.”