The founding father of Thodex, a sizeable Turkish cryptocurrency alternate service, who fled the nation with $2 billion final yr, has been arrested. He now faces some 40,564 years in jail.
Final yr varied cryptocurrency-related scams weighed in at $7.7 billion. A number of the scammers stole 1000’s; some ended up with tens of millions. Nonetheless, maybe essentially the most infamous crypto scammer ever is supposedly Faruk Fatih Özer, the founding father of Turkish cryptocurrency alternate Thodex. They allegedly fled the nation in April 2021 with about $2 billion that belonged to round 400,000 Thodex shoppers.
Faruk Fatih Özer was just lately arrested in Albania after Interpol issued an applicable order. The native police discovered the previous Thodex chief exec in Vlorë, Albania’s third most well-known metropolis, experiences Decrypt. Co (opens in new tab). The identification of Özer was confirmed utilizing biometric outcomes.
Whereas some Thodex workers had been already detained in April 2021, the manhunt for Özer continued for over a yr. In consequence, he and different founders and executives of the ill-fated crypto alternate at the moment are going through 40,564 years for every, Bloomberg (opens in new tab) reported earlier this yr.
Earlier than abandoning operations abruptly within the spring of 2021, Thodex had labored since 2017 and had about 700,000 shoppers in Turkey, the place cryptocurrencies have been extensively used to guard investments because the nationwide forex lira has been in a secular decline for years. Nonetheless, since virtually everybody established a cryptocurrency alternate in Turkey, the federal government imposed significantly stricter guidelines in early 2021 to crack down on this trade.
