Thodex: Turkey's Exchange CEO Fled With $2 Billion

In the third week of April 2021, customers of Thodex, one of Turkey's biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, found they could no longer trade. A notice on the site said the platform was temporarily closed and would reopen in four or five days, once it had finished work with what it called world-renowned banks and funding companies. The next day nobody could log in at all. Its founder, Faruk Fatih Özer, had already left the country for Albania.

About 391,000 people had accounts on Thodex when it froze. An exchange is crypto's version of a stockbroker: customers send it money, it buys and holds the coins for them, and the coins sit in the exchange's own wallets rather than the customer's. When the broker locks the door, the customer has nothing but a balance on a screen.

How much went missing

Nobody agrees on the number, and the gap is enormous. Turkish media reported from the first days that about $2 billion in customer assets had gone with Özer. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis put the value of the crypto lost at $2.6 billion, a figure later repeated by Fortune and The Block. The prosecutors who took the case to court settled on something far smaller: their indictment estimated investor losses at 356 million lira, about $13 million at the exchange rate when the verdict came in 2023.

The difference is not a rounding error. The top estimates describe roughly what customers held on the platform; the indictment counts the losses prosecutors could prove complainant by complainant. The truth for most of the 391,000 users sits somewhere in between, and in the five years since, no court or official body has published a final figure or a recovery total.

The founder who was 22

Özer, a high-school dropout, set up the company in 2017 under the name Koineks with 400,000 lira of starting capital. He was 22, a fact he later raised in his own defence. It took the name Thodex in March 2020, just as Turkey's crypto craze took off. The lira had been losing value for years, inflation was high, and millions of Turks were buying bitcoin and dollar-pegged stablecoins (digital tokens designed to hold the value of one US dollar) as a place to keep savings that the currency kept eroding.

The timing of the collapse was not an accident of the calendar. On 16 April 2021 the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey banned the use of crypto for payments, effective from 30 April. Within days Thodex had shut. On 23 April a second exchange, Vebitcoin, said it was ceasing operations, and four people linked to it were detained.

The manhunt

Istanbul's chief prosecutor opened an investigation, and police detained 62 people in the first sweep, including members of Özer's family and senior staff. On 30 April 2021 a court jailed six suspects pending trial. Interpol issued a red notice, an international request to find and arrest a wanted person, on 23 April. Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said Turkey had extradition agreements with most of the countries he might run to. Özer, posting from abroad, denied fleeing with anyone's money and said he had travelled to meet foreign investors.

He stayed free for about 16 months. Turkey's Interior Ministry announced on 30 August 2022 that Albanian police had detained him in Vlorë, a resort town on the Albanian coast. He fought extradition and lost, and was handed to Turkey in April 2023.

11,196 years, then a retrial

Twenty-one people went on trial at Istanbul's Anatolian 9th High Criminal Court, with prosecutors seeking up to 40,564 years each. On 7 September 2023 the court convicted Özer and his siblings, Güven Özer and Serap Özer, of aggravated fraud, leading a criminal organisation and money laundering. Each was sentenced to 11,196 years, 10 months and 15 days, with a judicial fine of 135 million lira, about $5 million. Sixteen of the 21 defendants were acquitted.

The size of the sentence made headlines around the world, but it was arithmetic rather than theatre: the total was built by adding together separate terms for each count of fraud. Özer was unrepentant in his final statement, reported by the state news agency Anadolu. "I am smart enough to lead any institution on Earth," he said, pointing to the company he had founded at 22, and added that if he had set up a criminal organisation he would not have acted so amateurishly.

The sentence did not stand. In January 2025 the Istanbul Regional Court of Appeal's 22nd Criminal Chamber overturned the verdict and sent the case back to the lower court. It ordered the three siblings released on the criminal organisation charge but kept them in custody on the fraud and money laundering charges. From that point Özer was a defendant awaiting retrial, not a convicted man serving 11,196 years.

A death in custody

On 1 November 2025 Özer was found dead in his cell at Tekirdağ No. 1 F-Type High Security Prison, west of Istanbul. He was about 31. Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç said an investigation had been opened and that the initial findings indicated suicide, while the exact cause would be set by the inquiry. His lawyer, Sevgi Erarslan, told Turkish media she had warned the prison that his mental health was poor and had asked for him to be moved to a psychiatric ward, and she accused the prison of neglect. No official autopsy finding has been published.

The case did not end with him. At a hearing on 6 February 2026, the trial court released Güven and Serap Özer to house arrest over the prosecutor's objection and adjourned to 17 June. No new verdict had been reported by mid-October 2026, and no recovery plan for Thodex customers has been announced.

Turkey's response came in two waves. In 2021 the payments ban was followed by anti-money-laundering rules that brought crypto platforms under MASAK, the Financial Crimes Investigation Board. In July 2024 Law No. 7518 amended the Capital Markets Law to define crypto assets for the first time and require every exchange serving Turks to hold a licence from the Capital Markets Board. Hundreds of platforms had been operating; by 2025 only a few dozen had applied to keep going.