“Respect the grind you never see,” Kerr Kriisa wrote in an Instagram post on Oct. 30, captioning a series of stylized photos showing him clutching a basketball and flexing his muscles in the jersey of his new team, the University of Cincinnati. Presumably, the well-traveled guard was referring to the unseen work of preparing for another college basketball season at his fourth school in four years, following stints at Arizona, West Virginia and Kentucky.
But according to a federal grand jury, Kriisa might as well have been referring to a much more sinister kind of hidden hustle.
On Monday, federal prosecutors unsealed a grand jury indictment charging the Estonian-born basketball player with orchestrating a yearslong wire fraud scheme that used fabricated personal crisis, false identities and other deceptions to induce two victims to send him roughly $2.2 million.
The indictment, returned in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia—where Kriisa played for the Mountaineers for the 2023-24 season—traces the alleged scheme back to at least 2022, when he was heading into his junior year at Arizona. The following year, after transferring to West Virginia, Kriisa would face a nine-game suspension for violating NCAA rules governing impermissible benefits while with the Wildcats.
Those unrelated NCAA infractions, however, pale in comparison to the federal allegations he now faces.
Prosecutors’ timeline suggests Kriisa’s alleged criminal conduct tracked closely with his college basketball career, with many of the acts occurring during the heart of the season.
Sportico was unable to identify an attorney representing Kriisa and his agent did not respond to an email request for comment.
According to the indictment, his alleged scheme involving the first victim began in August 2022 and continued through April 2025, when he was transferring from Kentucky. Prosecutors allege that Kriisa began targeting a second victim on Nov. 18, 2025, three days before Cincinnati lost to No. 6 Louisville in a game in which Kriisa, then a starter, shot 2-for-7 from the field.
Much of the alleged activity involving the second victim occurred in late December, as Cincinnati went on holiday break. On Dec. 29, prosecutors allege, Kriisa sent the second victim an email while posing as a fictional person named “Irene.” That same day, Cincinnati played Lipscomb, with Kriisa coming off the bench for the first time that season. He scored 15 points on 5-of-8 shooting from 3-point range.
Prosecutors allege Kriisa sent another email as “Irene” on Jan. 28, the same day Cincinnati beat Baylor. Kriisa played limited minutes that game while still recovering from an injury he suffered earlier that month. The five charged wire-fraud counts stemmed from emails and text messages Kriisa sent Feb. 1 to Feb. 4, a day before Cincinnati lost at home against West Virginia, his former team. Kriisa played 15 scoreless minutes that game, a loss, while posting the worst +/- of any player on either team.
The indictment says that the victim who was the recipient of those messages received them in Morgantown, W.Va., where WVU is based, but does not explain how Kriisa was connected to them.
