Fatih Özer: 11,196 Years in Prison, Then Found Dead in His Cell

On 1 November 2025, guards at the high-security F-type prison in Tekirdağ, a city on the Sea of Marmara west of Istanbul, found Faruk Fatih Özer dead in the single-person cell where he had been held since 2023. He was about 30 years old; Turkish and international outlets gave his age variously as 29, 30 and 31. Turkey's justice minister, Yılmaz Tunç, said an investigation had been opened and would establish the exact cause of death, but that "the initial findings indicate that it was a suicide."

Özer was the founder of Thodex, once one of Turkey's best-known cryptocurrency exchanges. An exchange is the crypto version of a stockbroker: customers deposit money, buy and sell coins on its platform, and trust it to hold their balances. In April 2021 Thodex froze every account and Özer left the country. Around 400,000 people, many of them ordinary savers trying to protect themselves from a falling Turkish lira, were locked out of their money. In September 2023 an Istanbul court sentenced him to 11,196 years in prison. He died with that verdict overturned on appeal, a retrial under way and almost none of the money returned.

The exchange that went dark

Özer started the business in 2017 under the name Koineks and later renamed it Thodex. It grew quickly on the back of celebrity advertising and promotions, at a time when Turkish inflation was high and the lira was losing value against the dollar. For many families, buying Bitcoin or another coin through a domestic app felt like a way to keep their savings intact.

On 21 April 2021 Thodex stopped all trading and withdrawals. The company said the halt was temporary and blamed a cyberattack. Özer had already gone. Reports based on airport records said he flew out of Istanbul Airport on the evening of 20 April, bound for Tirana in Albania. Within days Turkish police raided the company's offices and detained dozens of people, and Turkey asked Interpol to issue a Red Notice, an international request to find and arrest a wanted person.

How much was lost has never been settled. Early Turkish press reports said $2 billion in customer assets had vanished, and that figure followed Özer for the rest of his life. A 2021 estimate from the blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, widely cited since, put it at $2.6 billion. The prosecutors' indictment was far lower: it put the losses of the complainants named in the case at about 356 million Turkish lira, which Decrypt reported as roughly $43 million at the exchange rate of the time. Hürriyet Daily News described the alleged fraud as around $150 million. The gap reflects the difference between what customers believed their balances were worth and what the authorities could document in court. Either way, the money did not come back.

Arrest, extradition and a record sentence

Özer spent more than a year on the run. Albanian police arrested him on 30 August 2022 in Himarë, a coastal town in the Vlorë region, acting on the Interpol notice. An Albanian court approved his extradition at the end of December 2022, and after further appeals he was flown to Istanbul in April 2023 and detained on arrival.

The trial at the Anadolu 9th High Criminal Court in Istanbul covered 21 defendants, including Özer's older brother Güven Özer and older sister Serap Özer. The charges included founding and leading a criminal organisation, aggravated fraud using information systems, and money laundering. Turkish law counts a separate offence for each victim, which is why prosecutors had asked for more than 40,000 years. On 7 September 2023 the court sentenced all three siblings to 11,196 years, 10 months and 15 days each, and fined them 135 million lira. Özer denied running a criminal organisation and said Thodex was a legitimate business that had collapsed under financial strain.

The number was symbolic. Turkish prisoners serve far less than their nominal sentences, and the record figure said more about how many people had been hurt than about how long anyone would actually spend behind bars.

A death in a single cell

In January 2025 the Istanbul Regional Court of Appeal ruled on the case. According to Özer's lawyer, Sevgi Erarslan, it kept him in custody on the fraud charges but dropped the organised crime allegations. The original verdict was overturned and the case went back to the Anadolu court for a retrial, which was still running when he died.

Prison officials had housed Özer alone and, according to Hürriyet Daily News, he had been receiving periodic psychological support. After his death Erarslan said he had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder after entering prison and was on medication. She alleged that the family and his lawyers had warned the prison that he was at risk and had asked for him to be moved to a psychiatric institution, and that the prison had not acted. Those claims have not been tested publicly. Bloomberg reported that Özer had isolated himself in the period before his death.

The Tekirdağ chief prosecutor's office opened criminal and administrative investigations, and his body was taken to the Council of Forensic Medicine for a post-mortem examination. He was buried in Darıca, near Istanbul. No final forensic finding or prosecutor's decision has been made public since.

The people still waiting

Özer's death ended the case against him, but not the case. In early February 2026, at the retrial, the Anadolu court released Güven and Serap Özer from detention under house arrest, against the prosecutor's request, and adjourned the hearing to 17 June so that gaps in the file could be filled. Güven Özer told the court he denied the charges and had already spent four years in detention; Serap Özer said she had only been a salaried employee of her brother's company. No new verdict in the retrial has been reported.

For Thodex's customers, the five years since April 2021 have produced a famous sentence and very little else. No repayment programme for customers has been reported. In 2024 Turkey passed a law requiring crypto platforms to be licensed and supervised by its Capital Markets Board, but that protects future savers, not the ones who lost their money in 2021. The man the victims blamed is dead, the verdict that named him is gone, and the question of where the money went may now be answered, if at all, in a retrial without him.

If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988 (US). Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741. International Association for Suicide Prevention: https://www.iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres/