Exclusive | Sprawling $2.45M NYC home tied to $70M counterfeiting ring heads to auction for just $900K
A sprawling Forest Hills home tied to two brothers who helped finance a massive international counterfeit-money operation is hitting the auction block — with Uncle Sam opening the bidding at $900,000 — just $50,000 more than they paid for it more than two decades ago.The five-bedroom Colonial at 110-37 69th Ave.will be sold in an online federal auction on Oct.
23, according to the US Treasury Department, more than a decade after brothers Eduard and Arkadiy Bangiyev were arrested in a sprawling racketeering case involving tens of millions of dollars in fake US currency.The 3,572-square-foot Queens home, built in 1930, has 4½ bathrooms, an enclosed porch, a finished basement with an additional bedroom and bathroom, a sauna and a detached two-car garage.The home is currently valued at a whopping $2.455 million, according to Redfin.
The property sits on a roughly 5,000-square-foot lot and will be sold “as is,” according to the government auction listing.But behind the leafy Forest Hills address is a tangled history of counterfeit cash, an alleged $1 million jewelry fraud and years of litigation over who actually owned the property.Eduard and Arkadiy Bangiyev bought the home in 2003 for $850,000 with a $750,000 mortgage, according to a 2023 ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.Beginning in 2004, the brothers participated in a criminal enterprise that manufactured and distributed enormous quantities of counterfeit US currency, according to federal prosecutors and court records.The operation produced high-quality counterfeit notes in Israel and the US and smuggled them into the country concealed inside shipping containers carrying machinery.At its peak, the organization was bringing as much as $3 million in counterfeit currency into the US every three months, according to the Justice Department.More than $80 million in counterfeit currency was ultimately passed or seized around the world in connection with the operation, prosecutors said.T...