One of the biggest crypto-currency scams of 2021 is back in the spotlight this fall 2022. Passed to the ace for many investors, the scam of the Thodex platform in Turkey marked a major event. gigantic. More than 400,000 investors, on a platform that had 700,000, had their funds stolen in April 2021 by a man, Fatih Ozer, the platform’s CEO.
Estimating the total loot is difficult with the fluctuation. Chainalysis gave it to $2.6 billion in equivalent, which would represent “90% of the total value of scams recorded worldwide last year”. Since then, the main person responsible for this event was still unseen by radar. But the authorities knew that they had left Turkey by air. To save his image, the 28-year-old CEO explained his gesture on Twitter that he needed this money to repay his debts.
The homepage of the Thodex site no longer allows you to connect to your account (archive April 2021) © Thodex
“So I decided to stay alive and fight, work and pay my debts to you […] The day I repay all my debt, I will return to my country and deliver myself to justice”wrote Faruk Fatih Ozer on Twitter in April 2021.
40,000 years in prison, for example
The Bloomberg agency revealed his arrest in Albania at the end of last August. According to a press release from the Turkish Interior Ministry, the authorities have already begun the process of extraditing the CEO of Thodex on the run, in order to judge him as soon as possible. In addition to being targeted for fraud, his accusers want to put forward the financing of criminal activity.
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Turkey has a very strict policy on crypto-currencies and such an event would be an opportunity for the country to tighten the screws and show the example of possible penalties in the face of such setbacks. So much so that according to Bloomberg, Turkish prosecutors are demanding a prison sentence “more than 40,000 years old” for him and the other leaders of the crypto platform Thodex.
Unlike politicians, Turkish citizens have been rushing for several years to invest in cryptocurrencies to protect themselves from the devaluation of the Turkish lira. At the time of the Thodex scam, it was already nine years that fiat money lost against the dollar. The pandemic has not helped. In the first quarter of 2021, it lost 9% with the pair of the American currency.
To trap its users, Thodex has notably worked on the Dogecoin/TRY pair (its in-house token) in order to win new customers. A user had thus noticed that Thodex was selling a Dogecoin 30% cheaper, enough to rush a large number of new investors to its platform, without them being able to recover their funds afterwards. This was all happening hours before Fatih Ozer suddenly left and blocked funds from the affected crypto wallets.
