Fatih Özer: The Man Who Robbed Turkey and Ran

In the third week of April 2021, customers of Thodex, one of Turkey's biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, found they could no longer take their money out. A notice said the platform was pausing for a few days. On 20 April its founder and chief executive, Faruk Fatih Özer, then in his late twenties, boarded a flight from Istanbul to Albania. His social media accounts went dark behind him.

A crypto exchange works like a stockbroker: customers deposit lira, buy digital coins, and trust the exchange to hold both. Thodex had about 390,000 users locked out when it froze, according to Turkish authorities. Early reports said they had lost as much as $2 billion. Özer said the shutdown was temporary and that the company was investigating a cyberattack. He never reopened it.

Why Turks were in crypto

The timing mattered. By 2021 the Turkish lira had lost a large part of its value against the dollar, and inflation was eating savings. Many ordinary Turks bought crypto as a hedge, the way people elsewhere buy gold. Thodex, founded in Istanbul in 2017 by Özer, a high school dropout, rode that wave. Its young founder became a minor celebrity, photographed with senior politicians including the then foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and interior minister Süleyman Soylu.

Days before Thodex froze, on 16 April 2021, Turkey's central bank banned the use of crypto for payments, citing the risk of losses that could not be recovered. The ban did not cause Thodex's collapse, but it added to the panic among people who had put savings into coins.

The chase

Istanbul prosecutors opened an investigation on 22 April 2021. Police raided Thodex's offices and detained dozens of people in operations across several provinces, while Interpol issued a red notice, an international request to find and arrest Özer.

He stayed hidden for 16 months. On 30 August 2022 Albanian police arrested him in the Vlorë region in southern Albania. Albania's courts approved his extradition, and on 20 April 2023, two years to the day after he left, he was flown back to Istanbul and taken into custody.

How much was really lost

The $2 billion figure never held up in court. Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm, counted Thodex as a $2.6 billion "rug pull" (a project whose operators vanish with investors' money) in its early 2022 crime report. Turkish prosecutors, working from the exchange's records, alleged damage of 356 million lira, about $43 million at the time, and said about 253.7 million lira in crypto had been moved out of accounts Özer controlled. Most of it, a later indictment said, was converted to cryptocurrency and sent to foreign exchanges. Prosecutors also said the defendants had set up a gold company in relatives' names that did no real business but bought physical gold.

Gaps like this are common in exchange collapses. Headline estimates count everything customers held or moved on the platform. The court figure counts losses that complainants could prove. Either way, thousands of people lost savings, and no repayment scheme for Thodex customers has been announced.

11,196 years, then a retrial

Prosecutors charged 21 people and asked for sentences of up to 40,562 years each, built by stacking separate counts for each victim, a method Turkish law allows. On 7 September 2023 the Anadolu 9th High Criminal Court in Istanbul convicted Özer of founding and running a criminal organisation, aggravated fraud and money laundering. He was sentenced to 11,196 years, 10 months and 15 days in prison and fined 135 million lira. His brother Güven Özer and sister Serap Özer received the same sentence. Sixteen other defendants were acquitted.

The record-breaking number did not last. In January 2025 the Istanbul Regional Court of Appeal's 22nd Criminal Chamber overturned the verdict, dropped the criminal organisation charge and sent the case back for retrial, while keeping Özer in detention on the fraud charges. A second indictment, covering 572 more complainants and 94 million lira, had been returned to prosecutors by the court in 2024.

So when Özer died, he was not serving a final sentence. He was a detainee awaiting a new verdict.

Death in Tekirdağ

On 1 November 2025 Özer was found dead in a single-person cell at the Tekirdağ F-Type High Security Prison in northwestern Turkey. Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç said initial findings indicated suicide, that an investigation had been opened, and that the exact cause of death would be determined by it. The Tekirdağ chief prosecutor's office led the inquiry and an autopsy was carried out at the state Forensic Medicine Institute.

His lawyers said his mental health problems were known to the prison, that he had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and that his family had asked for protective measures about two weeks earlier. Turkish media reported claims of negligence by the prison. As of October 2026 no final finding from the investigation has been published.

The retrial went on without him. In February 2026 the court released Güven and Serap Özer from detention into house arrest, over the prosecutor's objection, and adjourned the case to deal with gaps in the file. The siblings have not been convicted in the retrial.

The money Thodex customers deposited has never been returned. Turkey has since tightened the rules: in July 2024 parliament passed a law placing crypto exchanges under the supervision of the Capital Markets Board, the country's stock market regulator, with licences, capital requirements and custody rules that did not exist when Thodex froze.