Crypto boss in Turkey gets over 11,000 years in prison after bankruptcy

A Turkish court has sentenced the former founder of a failed crypto exchange platform to an extremely long prison sentence: the man and his two brothers will each be in prison for more than 11,000 years.

Mega sentence for alleged mega losses

Like, among other things Yahoo Finance According to reports, Faruk Fatih Ozer, who once founded the crypto exchange Thodex, has now been sentenced by a Turkish court to a total of 11,196 years in prison. His two brothers also received similarly long prison sentences because they were also accused of fraud and other crimes.

Ozer founded the Thodex platform in 2017 after dropping out of school. Thodex quickly became one of Turkey’s largest crypto platforms, but in April 2021 the company was forced to announce that it could no longer continue operations. The company founder fled to Albania to avoid persecution by the Turkish authorities.

After a long legal battle, Ozer was expelled from Albania a few months ago and deported back to Turkey. At the time of its bankruptcy, Thodex was no longer able to pay out its customers’ funds, meaning millions of euros in investments were lost. To date, however, it is not clear how much damage the failure of Thodex really caused.

The criminal authorities in Turkey estimate that Thodex investors lost the equivalent of around $13 million. However, the country’s media speaks of values ​​that are many times higher, with alleged losses of up to two billion dollars. What is notable in the proceedings is not only the gigantic sentence, but also the fact that Thodex went bankrupt before the big crypto crash, more than a year before the collapse of FTX and Alameda Research.