(TNS) — Last year, a grand jury found a former Kalispell man guilty of playing a role in a sprawling money laundering scheme that took in over $2 million from fraudulent listings posted online, like fake dating accounts and bogus real estate offers.

A federal judge sentenced Randall V. Rule to 10 years in prison for assisting in taking in those illicit funds and covering their origin by transferring them into cryptocurrency. The losses from Rule and his co-conspirators’ scheme were just an inkling of the billions lost nationwide to fraud enabled by the digital age. In the past decade, losses to cyber crimes like sham crypto investments have exploded, going from $1…