A Turkish court has sentenced Faruk Fatih Özer to 11,196 years and 10 months in prison for aggravated fraud, criminal organisation leadership, and money laundering following the collapse of Thodex, Turkey’s largest cryptocurrency exchange at the time of its failure.
Thodex ceased operations on April 20, 2021, with Özer posting a message claiming the exchange was pausing for “a few days” to address an unspecified partnership deal. He then fled to Albania. Turkish authorities subsequently discovered that the exchange’s wallets had been emptied. Estimates of the losses range from $400 million to $2 billion, affecting approximately 400,000 users.
Özer was arrested in Albania in August 2022 and extradited to Turkey. He died by suicide in prison in November 2023, shortly after his sentencing.
The sentencing of multiple co-defendants brought the combined sentences to over 40,000 years — a reflection of Turkey’s legal system, which imposes individual counts for each identified victim and runs sentences consecutively rather than concurrently.
What an investigator sees
Thodex is a pure exit scam — the most straightforward type of crypto fraud. The operator accumulates customer deposits, transfers them to personal wallets, and disappears. There is no complex financial engineering, no fraudulent trading algorithm, no Ponzi structure. The fraud is simply theft, made possible by the fact that the exchange operated as an unregulated custodian with no external audit, no independent board, and no regulatory oversight.
The scale — hundreds of thousands of victims in a country where crypto adoption was driven partly by the lira’s volatility — underscores why custodial regulation matters. Turkey had no comprehensive crypto regulatory framework at the time of Thodex’s collapse. The victims had no deposit insurance, no regulatory complaint mechanism, and no way to verify that the exchange actually held the assets it claimed.
Özer’s death in prison before any appeal adds a grim dimension to an already disturbing case. But the structural lesson is clear: unregulated custodians holding customer funds without external verification will produce exit scams. It is a question of when, not whether.