Faruk Fatih Özer, a cryptocurrency exchange founder based out of Turkey, has been caught by the Turkish authorities and may face jail sentence for, well, over 40,000 years, as per a report by Digital Trends.
According to the report, Faruk Fatih Özer founded a Turkish crypto exchange called Thodex in 2017 and was on the run from the authorities for more than a year after fleeing with $2 billion. The actual sentence could be “as high as 40,564 years.”
Thodex reportedly 700,000 users at its peak. According to the report, there are many in Turkey who invest in crypto exchanges due to the steady decline of the country’s native currency over the past years. This may have helped Thodex. But a few years after coming into existence, Thodex ran into trouble.
“In April 2021, Thodex abruptly paused all trading, claiming that an outside investment forced it to pause its operations for up to five days. Özer then claimed that the company had to halt trading completely, citing cyberattacks as the cause. Despite the promise that customer funds would remain safe, for around 400,000 users, that simply was not the case. The users lost access to their accounts, and subsequently, their funds.”, said the report.
The Turkish police managed to detain many employees at the company but Faruk managed to escape and fled to Albania. He is alleged to have taken $2 billion “out of the funds that belong to the company’s investors and clients.” After about a year, he was caught in the Albanian city of Vlorë and his identity was confirmed via biometric verification. Now he awaits trial in Turkey along with other executives from Thodex.
