Erdoğan’s unorthodox economic policies-repeatedly cutting interest rates-were supposed to raise investment and make Turkey less dependent on foreign powers. Instead they led the country into an economic crisis; the value of the lira hit the skids, and after a failed coup attempt in 2016 people figured it would only get worse. Voilà, 2017 was also the first year bitcoin’s value shot sky high, from $9,000 to $20,000. Just as they had 23 years earlier, citizens began searching for places to shelter their money.

Kocaeli is an industrial port town about 100 kilometers east of Istanbul surrounded by a checkerboard of tobacco and sugar beet fields, petrochemical plants, and paper mills. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Kocaeli became a manufacturing boomtown, and its residents muscled the newly minted Republic of Turkey into the Industrial Revolution. Roman emperors once lived there, and their crumbling fortress walls still wind through the landscape. When Özer was born, Turkey’s economy was in a tailspin.

I canceled the trip. Rumors flew that he was no longer in Albania. Güven and Serap idled in prison, awaiting their brother’s capture so that their trial could begin. He could be in a hotel in Montenegro, a yacht off Kosovo, or a tropical hideaway in Thailand, people said; or he could be locked in a Tirana basement. People told me they thought he was dead, resting in a shallow grave. Nearly one year after he disappeared, there was no sign of Özer or the money.

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He offered scandalously cheap commission rates, so low that industry experts were stumped as to how Thodex could be making a profit. The company also allowed people to buy crypto via credit cards; at times that was money an investor didn’t really have, but the hope was that a coin’s value would go up faster than the interest accrued on the card. Özer was also intent on taking Thodex global.

We began an occasional correspondence, though I often wondered if he really was the person answering my questions, if he was even really alive. On an overcast July morning, officers escorted those defendants into Istanbul’s beige brutalist courthouse, just a short walk from the Thodex headquarters where all the people on trial had once worked. Of the 62 people who had been initially arrested, 21 were charged. The trial went forward under a swirl of confusion and skepticism-about Özer’s whereabouts, about the large payments now being sent to victims from undisclosed sources, and about Erarslan’s legitimacy as his official lawyer.