The founder and former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Thodex, Farooq Fatih Ozer, has been sentenced to 11,196 years in prison for defrauding investors of millions of dollars and has begun serving his sentence.
Thodex, once one of the largest crypto exchanges in Turkey, was used by Ozer to misappropriate funds from investors.
It is reported that Ozer carried out this fraud with the help of members of his family. His brother and sister also received lengthy prison sentences for their roles in the scheme.
Ozer and his siblings have been collectively sentenced to a total of 43,000 years in prison for financial crimes. After Thodex collapsed in 2021, Ozer fled to Albania with investor assets. He was arrested in Albania last year with an international Interpol warrant, extradited to Turkey, and charged with money laundering, organized crime, and fraud.
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Despite the allegations, Ozer claims that if he had criminal intentions, he would not have acted so amateurishly.
At one point, Turkish media reported that Ozer had fled the country with a hardware wallet containing $2 billion worth of assets. He founded Thodex in 2017, which quickly became one of the largest crypto exchanges in Turkey.
The sentences for Ozer and his family are among the longest ever handed down by the courts in Istanbul. Following the abolition of the death penalty in 2004, such extraordinary prison sentences have become more common in Turkey.
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In a similar case, the preacher of the television cult, Adnan Oktar, was sentenced in 2022 to 8,658 years in prison for fraud and sexual crimes, with at least 10 of his followers receiving the same sentence.
Turkish courts used Ozer’s case as a stern warning to potential violators, especially as cryptocurrencies gained popularity in the country, considering that many Turks turned to cryptocurrencies to protect against the instability of their currency, the lira.
