The people behind the fraudulent Turkey-based cryptocurrency platform are looking at hard time for deceiving their customers.
Ever since Thodex closed its doors back in April of 2021, CEO Faruk Fatih Ozer has reportedly fled to Albania with $2 billion worth of assets and hasn’t been seen since. He probably won’t resurface for a while as, according to a report by Bloomberg, Ozer and 21 of his colleagues will have to do thousands of years in prison.
While the indictment reads that the team behind the Thodex crypto exchange will have to count for $24M worth of losses, some would argue that the numbers were significantly larger than that.
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According to a report by Chainalysis, "90% of the total value lost to rug pulls" in 2021 were the result of the Thodex scheme, which amounted to over $2.5 billion. There were approximately 400k Thodex customers while the platform was still active.
Interestingly enough, right after the rug pull had happened, Ozer promised to reimburse his investors, and take full blowback from the Turkish law enforcement. However, considering the extremity of the sentence, it is very unlikely that he will be seen anytime soon.
Meanwhile, there have been more than 80 people detained due to their ties to the company, with six of them already serving prison time.
Ozer will be taking the top spot as probably the first and last person in the crypto industry to receive such an absurd sentence. Likewise, if the $2.5B worth of assets were to be confirmed by the court, this would be the largest crypto scheme to date.
Back in February, the founder of BitConnect Satish Kumbhani, who vanished from India after a $2.4B crypto Ponzi scheme, is now facing 70 years in prison.
