Crypto CEO handed 11,000 year prison sentence

In Turkey, many people buy Bitcoin to, let’s be honest here, escape President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rather experimental trend of setting interest rates to control inflation. Erdogan often disagrees with central bankers and economy ministers and therefore has his own way of doing things. This has led to sky-high inflation and an impoverishment of the local population, who have therefore been buying crypto en masse for years to protect their savings from deflating further.

Albania

A young Turk named Faruk Fatih Özer understood this trend early on. He came up with a plan and a few years ago founded the local crypto platform Thodex that offered very good exchange options to anyone in Istanbul who wanted to escape extreme inflation.

Very quickly, Thodex became extremely popular

SENTENCED TO 11,196 YEARS EACH -

Now that would make crooks think twice.

“A Turkish cryptocurrency boss and his two siblings have been jailed for 11,196 years each for defrauding investors of millions of dollars.” https://t.co/Bvc0pA5MP3

— kristen shaughnessy (@kshaughnessy2) September 8, 2023

Some 400,000 locals exchanged quite a lot of their local currency into Bitcoin and other digital coins via Thodex, until the company had savings of some 2 billion dollars in crypto.

Then the site went offline very spectacularly in April 2021 and no one could access their digital coins anymore. That same day, Faruk disappeared from the face of the earth and it quickly became clear that he had planned from the start to take the money and run.

Turkey, a member of Nato and Interpol, set up a so-called ‘Red Notice’, which also obliged foreign police services to search for Faruk. He was finally arrested in Albania last year after he had spent several months living like a real billionaire in Tirana.

The Istanbul court did not find it so amusing and sentenced him to a prison term of 11,196 years.

Such incredibly long sentences are nothing new in Turkey, where Fethullah Gülen, Erdogan’s former political opponent, was sentenced to 1,900 years in prison in 2016.

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