A year after the platform ceased trading and its CEO disappeared after an exit scam, thodex Significant developments took place in the case. According to Hürriyet, if the court accepts the prosecutor’s defense in the case, the founder and executives of the Thodex team could be sentenced to thousands of years in prison.
Thodex seeks defendants up to 40,000 years in prison
According to the indictment of the prosecutor in charge of the case, Faruk Fatih Özer, founder and CEO of crypto exchange Thodex, and 20 people involved in its operations will face up to 40,564 years in prison.
According to the indictment reported by Demirören news agency about a year after the platform stopped trading, the defendants; He is accused of forming a criminal organization, fraud and laundering proceeds from illegal activities.
Ozer, 28, has been missing since last year and is still wanted by Interpol with a red notice, as well as efforts by Turkish law enforcement to find him in several countries. Özer was last seen in camera footage at the Istanbul airport, which emerged a year ago.
What happened in the Thodex incident?
Thodex had become popular during the recent crypto boom, which attracted many Turks who wanted to protect the Turkish lira from high inflation. The stock market, which has nearly 400,000 investors, suddenly went offline last spring.
According to media reports at that time, Özer fled to Albania with $2 billion worth of money. Bloomberg reported in April 2021 from an unknown location that the Thodex founder promised to return to his country to reimburse customers and face justice.
Again, according to the indictment, the losses amounted to 356 million liras (24 million dollars). However, a Chainalysis report released in January estimates the figure should be much higher—around $2.6 billion.
Binance Detail in Fraud
According to the indictment, the prosecutor’s office wrote a letter to the Banks Association of Turkey to seize the balances of the company named Thodex and the detained defendants, pursuant to the decision to confiscate the properties of the managers involved in fraud. As a result of this development, it was stated as a critical detail in the indictment that the balances were transferred to the account opened by the Istanbul Anatolian Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office.
As a result of this process, the prosecution determined that the Thodex suspects had transferred funds to the leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance and contacted the exchange through the Anti-Cybercrime Branch Office to confiscate the suspects’ cryptocurrencies.
It was determined that 10 suspects, including the founder and manager of Thodex, Faruk Fatih Özer, had wallets containing various cryptocurrencies on the stock market. Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, announced that the suspects’ crypto accounts have been suspended or terminated.
More than 60 people were detained and six jailed after Thodex collapsed. Turkish authorities have launched fraud investigations against Thodex and Vebitcoin, another Turkish trading platform that ceased operations after Turkey’s central bank banned the use of cryptocurrencies for payments. In October, another major Turkish exchange, Coinzo, also terminated its crypto trading services.
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