Thodex Founder Jailed For 11,196 Years

These days we hear about a new crypto trial almost every month, yet we often do not know what happens to the participants. The reason for this is usually very simple. In most cases, nothing happens. Their real identity is not even discovered and they do not get arrested in some cases. Faruk Fatih Özer was not this lucky, however, and his sentence conveys a strong message to anyone who would want to follow in his footsteps.

The story of Thodex

Thodex was a Turkish crypto exchange that had almost 400,000 users before shutting down. Cryptocurrencies have been very popular for the past several years in Turkey, due to extreme inflation. Speculation goes that the exchange had deposits in the amount of around $3000 million when it collapsed. After the crash in 2021, the founder of the exchange, Faruk Özer, escaped to Albania, and several of his family members also left the country in a hurry.

In the days before the collapse, Thodex was running a campaign that offered 150 DOGE tokens to any newly registered users. Similarly unsustainable campaigns aimed at aggressively acquiring new users have already raised alarms about the company earlier, but unfortunately these signs were ignored. On April 19 of 2021, the site started to become laggy. A day later, users could no longer withdraw money or engage in any trading related activities. The site stopped functioning completely. Faruk claimed that this happened, because Thodex was “under a cyberattack”. However, since no further developments followed the initial announcement, Turkish authorities started an investigation into the company on April 22. Soon after, it was discovered that Faruk had stolen around $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency and went on the run. Authorities ended up issuing arrest warrants against more than 50 people in connection with the alleged scam.

The capture of Faruk Özer

Faruk Özer was successfully hiding in Albania for more than a year before being captured by local authorities during the August of 2022. Upon his capture, he claimed that he already compensated many victims, but it turned out that only a fraction of the site’s users ever saw any of their money back. He was extradited to Turkey and has been jailed for life, for more than 11,000 years to be exact, as Turkey is one of the few countries with legislative systems that allow for ridiculously long jail sentences. 

He claims to be innocent to this day and insists that the site was indeed under a cyberattack and he was not planning to steal the money, because “if he had wanted to steal the money, he could have done it in a much better way”. Unfortunately for him, the judge was not convinced about his pure intent, despite the “strong” arguments made by him in his defense.

Faruk was probably still lucky though, as Turkey only abolished the death penalty in 2004 and sentences that result in thousands of years of prison time would have been certain death sentences before 2004. Dozens of other people also received long jail sentences. The 21 main suspects, some of whom are still on trial, have so far received a total jail time of more than 40,000 years.

The importance of such a strong sentence

Strong sentences could better discourage perpetrators from committing similar crypto frauds in the US and Europe. While most of the frauds remain not properly investigated and some of the scams are so clever that technically they are not even illegal, the punishments are very soft even when the perpetrators are sentenced to jail. Earlier in July this year, a US court sentenced New York resident Eddy Alexandre to 9 years in prison for stealing $250 million from users through his crypto company. With good behavior he could be out even sooner. Hardly a just punishment for stealing the life savings of thousands or tens of thousands of people. One can get more prison time for simple tax fraud. Until fraudsters get serious jail time or life in prison for these enormous scams, there will be just too much financial incentive to be a crypto scammer. 

Also, a proper crypto regulation all over the world would be a serious step towards the formed laws and punishments for crypto crimes. If you want to know more, read our article about the most high-profile crypto attacks and a guide on how to avoid scam schemes.