Turkey on Saturday detained the chief of one of the country’s biggest cryptocurrency firms after launching a manhunt for the founder of another exchange who fled to Albania.
April 24,2021 Turkey on Saturday detained the chief of one of the country’s biggest cryptocurrency firms after launching a manhunt for the founder of another exchange who fled to Albania. The Turkish crypto boom threatens to go bust quickly as companies fold and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government prepares to rein in the unregulated digital currency market. The volume of crypto purchases in the nation of 84 million people rose 10-fold between November and March as Turks sought ways to preserve their savings during a steep drop in the value of the lira currency. But the market began to unravel when the Istanbul-based Thodex exchange’s founder Faruk Fatih Ozer fled to Albania with a reported $2 billion in investors’ assets this week. Thodex shut down while holding investments from nearly 400,000 users. Turkey issued an international arrest warrant and detained dozens of Thodex employees in raids staged across the country on Friday. Officials also blocked the account of the Vebitcoin exchange—one of Turkey’s five-largest—and launched an investigation after it also abruptly ceased operations. Local news reports said police detained Vebitcoin chief executive Ilker Bas and three other company employees on Saturday as part of a broader fraud probe.
