Türkiye
11,196 years in prison: Crypto thief sentenced to insanely long prison term
Faruk Özer was sentenced to over 11,000 years in prison in Turkey.
© Berk Ozkan / Picture Alliance
The head of what was once Turkey’s largest crypto exchange, Thodex, was sentenced to more than 11,000 years in prison in his home country. According to media reports, he is said to have stolen 1.9 billion euros. The prosecution demanded an even longer prison sentence.
In April 2021, one of Turkey’s largest crypto exchanges went offline. With the site, the funds of more than 400,000 users disappeared, around 1.9 billion euros at the time. The founder of the Thodex platform, formerly known as Koineks, fled to Albania. He was caught there in the summer of 2022 and extradited to Turkey in April 2023. How “Coindesk” citing local media reported, the verdict has now been passed for the short-term billionaire.
Turkish prosecutors demanded over 40,000 years
Faruk Özer, currently 29 years old, was sentenced to a total of 11,196 years, 10 months and 15 days in prison and a fine of around 4.7 million euros. A similar fate also befalls two of his siblings, who were also involved in the theft of customer funds, it is said.
The siblings are accused of forming and running a criminal organization, various forms of fraud and money laundering. The extreme verdict doesn’t even come close to meeting the prosecutor’s demand. She demanded 40,562 years in prison for Özer.
Too “amateurish” for a criminal organization
As “Cointelegraph” reports, the crypto thief expressed his displeasure in court with the high fine and stuck to his version that Thodex was just a failed crypto company that failed. The wording of his translated court statement: “I am smart enough to run any institution in the world. This is evident from the company I founded at the age of 22. If I were to start a criminal organization, I would not be so amateurish What is more in question is whether the accused in the case have not been the actual victims for more than 2 years.”
The trial consisted of attachments against 21 people, 16 of whom were acquitted for lack of evidence.
Of course, the verdict can be simplified to “life imprisonment”. The many years are purely symbolic. For perspective: would be 11,196 years ago, i.e. 9173 BC. If someone had been put in prison before the start of the Mesolithic Age, they would have been in Central Europe.
Sources: Coindesk, AA, Cointelegraph