Faruk Fatih Özer, the founder and CEO of Turkish cryptocurrency exchange service Thodex, has been handcuffed in Albania after leaving Turkey with enough money to last a man for the rest of his life…

Tom’s Hardware reported that Özer left Turkey last year with two billion dollars worth of crypto. It is significant in itself, but there were a lot of scams in crypto circles the previous year, amounting to $7.7 billion. However, most of the scams and thefts were in the millions, so Özer’s case is worth far more money.

Özer left Turkey in April 2021 after stealing money from approximately 400,000 Thodex clients. The amount of money made him one of the most notorious thieves of his “genre”. Still, despite hiding in Albania for more than a year, the authorities in Vlorë found him, identified him through biometric (for instance, fingerprint) results and handed him over to the Turkish authorities. Before the arrest, 21 other employees were locked up when the founder disappeared. Özer and the other Thodex executives and founders each face 40,064 years in prison. We didn’t write that down: forty thousand, five hundred and sixty-four!

In 2017, Thodex had 700,000 clients in Turkey after the Turkish currency, the lira, had been in a long decline, and users could protect their investments with cryptocurrency. However, in 2021, the Turkish government tightened up on crypto after the country’s digital currency exchange in this way increased significantly.

In May, six previously sequestered defendants, Guven Özer and Serap Ozer, attended the hearing of the Anatolian 9th High Criminal Court. There were lawyers there, along with the then not detained defendants. The indictment was 268 pages long, and Özer and his two brothers were charged with fraud. At the time, there were about 2027 complaints. The indictment also alleged that Özer and other Thodex executives and employees caused damage worth 356 million Turkish liras…

That isn’t a weak case.

Source: WCCFTech