Faruk Fatih Özer, creator of the failed cryptocurrency platform Thodex, was found dead at the weekend in his cell in a high-security prison in Tekirdağ (northwestern Turkey), the country‘s authorities confirmed. The jailed Turkish businessman, 31, was serving an 11,000-year prison sentence for massive fraud offences following the collapse in early 2021 of a famous cryptocurrency platform, in what was considered one of the biggest scandals in the sector in the country.
Özer was found hanged on 1 November in the bathroom of his cell, where he was being held in solitary confinement at Tekirdağ Prison. The Turkish prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation, while the body was taken to the Institute of Forensic Medicine for an autopsy and then handed over to the family for burial the following day, in accordance with Muslim tradition. The Turkish Ministry of Justice said that all the images and circumstances surrounding the incident will be reviewed. “There are cameras at the entrances to the rooms. If anything suspicious has happened, everything will be investigated,” said Minister Yılmaz Tunç.
Turkish media reported that during the count the night before his death, Özer reportedly told prison officials: “I will be released in February“. Later, in a late-night round, he said he would watch television before going to bed. His body was found dead in the early hours of the morning, allegedly using a towel and a sheet to hang himself. Notes were found in the cell, one of which bizarrely read “Place the stool, put the rope tightly around his neck“.
Founded in 2017 initially under the name ‘Koineks’, Thodex rose to prominence at the height of the cryptocurrency boom in Turkey, thanks to the use of aggressive advertising campaigns featuring celebrities. However, in early 2021, the platform suddenly suspended trading, locking up the funds of hundreds of thousands of users.
400,000 investors lost $150 million
After Turkish authorities accused Özer of defrauding nearly 400,000 investors of around $150 million, he decided to flee to Albania, where he was arrested – in the Albanian province of Vlora – in August 2022, and subsequently extradited to Turkey in April 2023. Although he always denied running a criminal organisation and defended Thodex as “a legitimate business that collapsed due to financial difficulties”, in 2023 a court convicted him and his two brothers of criminal organisation, aggravated fraud and money laundering.
The sentence, which amounted to 11,196 years in jail, was currently pending review by the appeals court, and the judicial process was still open. During this time in prison, Özer had been held in solitary confinement and received regular psychological support; in his last statement to the court before being sentenced in 2021 for the massive cryptocurrency fraud scandal, he claimed then that his intellectual capacity was sufficient to run “all the institutions in the world”.
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Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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