Thodex founder Faruk Fatih Özer arrested He was charged in Balora province, Albania on August 31 and will be deported to Turkey for trial after initial questioning.
Özer is the name behind the important Thodex carpet pulling in Turkey in 2021. Özer he stole over $2 million. Interpol has been tracking him for 17 months with a red notice at the request of Turkey.
arrest
A major news source in Turkey reported that Özer provided a fake ID to Albanian police when he showed up at the door. could be identified.
Albanian Interior Minister Bredar Chuchi contacted his Turkish counterpart Suleyman Soylu to inform the country of Ozer’s arrest.
At the time of this writing, the Albanian military still holds Özer. Turkey’s Interpol has confirmed that the necessary paperwork for Ozer’s return is in place and is reportedly working to get him back.
According to Turkish watchdog MASAK, report, Özer has three accounts with over $13 million. Most of his funds are kept in Malta cryptocurrency exchange wallets. The Turkish military is looking for 21 other collaborators of his, and prosecutors are looking to sentence them all to a total of 40,564 years in prison.
A Turkish lawyer familiar with the Thodex case commented on the status of the case, Said The user may be compensated if Özer can prove that the funds allegedly held by him are his. Only then will these funds be confiscated by legal authorities and distributed to users who have lost their investment.
sodex scam
Thodex was launched as a local exchange in Turkey in 2017 and has grown to over 700,000 users by 2021. It became the first Turkish local exchange to expand globally.
In April 2021, withdrawal transactions were suddenly suspended. Thodex officials calmed users down by saying the outage was due to a temporary internal situation.
They informed users that Thodex was going through a sales process that was expected to take five days, and that they could continue trading after the sales process was over. However, Özer fled the country by his third day, taking over $2 million in cryptocurrency.
The chart above is from Chainalysis 2022 Crypto Crime ReportThe $2.6 million stolen was nearly double the size of the second largest rug pull of the year.
The severity of the attack has prompted Turkish regulators to implement comprehensive crypto regulation. The country took the first step towards building a full-fledged regulatory network in April 2021 and has been working since then.
