Turkish crypto exchange Thodex CEO gets 11,000-year sentence for $2B scam: Report
The Thodex founder fled the country in 2021 only to be detained in Albania in Aug. 2022 and extradited to Turkey in April 2023.
The former CEO of Turkish crypto exchange Thodex, Faruk Fatih Özer, was sentenced to 11,196 years in prison by a Turkish court on charges of "establishing, managing and being a member of an organization", "qualified fraud", "laundering of property values".
The Anatolian 9th High Criminal Court sentenced Ozer along with his two siblings to the same jail sentence of 11 thousand 196 years, 10 months and 15 days in prison along with a $5 million fine, reported Turkish state-run news agency, Anadolu Agency.
The Turkish crypto exchange was one of the largest digital asset trading platforms in the country before it abruptly imploded in 2021. The exchange halted services of the platform abruptly without prior notice and the founder Özer fled the country along with users' assets totalling $2 billion total in crypto. At the time Ozer had refuted all claims of a possible exit scam.
The fugitive founder was finally detained in Albania in August 2022 where he was serving a jail sentence before he was extradited to Turkey in April 2023 on charges of fraud and money laundering. Ozer was already in jail for failure to submit the tax documents since July, while the most recent conviction comes for defrauding customers.
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