Then he had Erarslan pull up an image of a cartoon mocking the court. Most of the other defendants were released. The chief judge handed Güven, Serap, and Özer the same sentence: 11,196 years in prison-for establishing and managing a criminal organization and laundering assets. It was the longest sentence in Turkey’s history, handed out the month before the Republic’s centennial. Visibly annoyed, the chief judge ordered him to remove it. The verdict came quietly on a balmy Thursday in September 2023 to an almost empty courtroom.
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“His phone was off, and would never turn on again after that,” he said. It had public credibility. People were devastated about losing their life savings, but they were also plagued by the mystery of what happened to Özer; they talked about Özer haunting them in recurring dreams. Victims formed support groups online. It checked out as a reputable company,” he said. People questioned how Özer-this self-made 27-year-old who didn’t quite fit the profile of a tech bro or a transnational cybercriminal-could engineer the biggest theft Turkey had ever seen all by himself. “I believed in it. Tax registration number. Employees. It had a license. It had an office.
Reported the theft to the Istanbul Public Prosecutor’s cybercrime unit.
He was invited to sit on the board of organizations such as Blockchain Turkey, a respected crypto nonprofit in Istanbul, alongside the country’s biggest bankers. He appeared regularly on news (Resource) channels and in tech blogs. He was attending private meetings with Turkey’s highest ministers. Özer says he compensated the customers’ losses out of his own pocket. At one point, Thodex was hacked for many millions of lira (supposedly $14 million US), allegedly from an IP address in China. Experts from regulating agencies audited Thodex’s financial infrastructure-and Özer claimed they gave the company a clean bill of health. Reported the theft to the Istanbul Public Prosecutor’s cybercrime unit. Istanbul began to feel like Las Vegas.
Özer paraded it around like a trophy.
In a TV interview, he explained, “People realized that it is a technology that they can turn into cash at any time. Soon, Özer was ingratiated into the upper echelons of Turkish society. One of the most important helping tools in the spread of this perception was undoubtedly bitcoin ATMs.” He aired television commercials pushing Thodex, featuring a dozen Turkish celebrities, including actress Pınar Deniz and pop star Simge. Özer paraded it around like a trophy. In 2020, the company secured a money services business license from the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. That caught the attention of Turkey’s middle and upper classes.
Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis ranked rug pulls as the primary scam of 2021, accounting for 37 percent of all cryptocurrency scam revenue that year, up from 1 percent the year before. Thodex was at the top of that roster, and nearly every major outlet from Bloomberg to Newsweek published headlines like “Turkish Crypto Exchange Goes Bust as Founder Flees Country” and “Turkish Cryptocurrency Founder Faruk Fatih Özer Seen Fleeing Country With Suspected $2 Billion From Investors.” CoinGeek called it “the biggest scam in the digital asset industry in 2021.” The New York Times’ headline read, “Possible Cryptocurrency Fraud Is Another Blow to Turkey’s Financial Stability.” In Turkey, the country I now call home, people were reeling: For years, crypto had been built up-largely by Özer but by others too-as a way out of economic volatility.