https://www.tomshardware.com/news/thodex-crypto-exchange-founder-busted-faces-40000-years-in-jail Note to myself #1: There is no difference between getting 40 or 40 000 years in prison based on my age, thus I may go BRAVE, when I commit crimes because fortune favors the brave! Note to myself #2: Before going on the lam, I should google "list of non extradition countries" and choose one as future residence. "The founder of Thodex, a sizeable Turkish cryptocurrency exchange service, who fled the country with $2 billion last year, has been arrested. He now faces some 40,564 years in jail. .... perhaps the most notorious crypto scammer ever is supposedly Faruk Fatih Özer, the founder of Turkish cryptocurrency exchange Thodex. They allegedly fled the country in April 2021 with about $2 billion that belonged to around 400,000 Thodex clients. Before abandoning operations abruptly in the spring of 2021, Thodex had worked since 2017 and had about 700,000 clients in Turkey, where cryptocurrencies have been widely used to protect investments as the national currency lira has been in a secular decline for years. However, since almost everyone established a cryptocurrency exchange in Turkey, the government imposed considerably stricter rules in early 2021 to crack down on this industry."
This guy knew in April that Turkey was aware he entered Albania... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56865119 Just to be caught on a beach. What a moron of a criminal. Funny how even idiots manage to pull out scams for billions.
It all starts and finish with a fiat money chase anyway. The scam, the scammers and the scammed are all a fruit of a dollar dream. Crypto is just a tool and people were scammed before it existed. The bait is always the same: make easy millions of dollars, euro or pound... I can't tell how easy it was to fall for this scam, as it presented itself as an exchange I think, but I have seen people falling like zombies for the onecoin Bulgarian scam, a coin that didn't even exist. Some people get what they deserve.
Even if a criminal makes it to a non-extradition country, he has to lay pretty low.(thus can't really enjoy the billions) In most of these countries if local criminals find out that you have no legal protection but plenty of money, that is a recipe for disaster. Ah, and if most of your stolen money is in crypto, then it is easily accessible because you are your own bank! Your crypto is as secure as your ability to withstand pain.
So, they FINALLY caught him! I've been waiting for this moment for quite some time. I was surprised, but delighted when they found out who was behind the big BitFinex hack, and they caught the crock of Wall Street too. Looks like she's working with authorities now... I guess a big list of villains will be going down with her. And then recently we found out who was behind the DAO hack. The next big thing, will be tracking down Dr. Ruja. However, it is most likely she has already been murdered. Her top henchmen were found stuffed in suitcases and left in a ditch. Her body is probably somewhere buried by now. The FBI recently added Ruja to their top-10 wanted list, but there may be little point in further continuing the search.
Landing in the FBI top-10 just for financial crimes is quite an achievement. Among all the serial murderers and terrorists...
It boggles my mind how dumb some criminals can be. I mean seriously, did he really think he was going to just take $2 Billion of customer funds off the table and nobody would ever try to hunt him down? I've stated this before and I'll say it again one more time. If you fuck enough people over, there's nowhere to hide. You're going to get found, and it's probably going to happen pretty fast. End of story.