The Turkish Prosecutor’s Office has today opened a “fraud” investigation against a popular cryptocurrency exchange, Thodex, whose owner has fled abroad and hundreds of thousands of users are unable to access between 2,000 and 10,000 million dollars in investments.
Thodex, founded in 2017 by businessman Faruk Fatih Özer, was one of the best-known electronic ‘exchanges’ in Turkey for cryptocurrency transactions such as bitcoin and, above all, Dogecoin, Holo or Tether.
Cybercrime police are searching Thodex offices in Istanbul’s Kadiköy neighborhood, Turkish news agency Anadolu reports.
The Thodex website announced yesterday a “4-5 day” suspension for an unspecified “investment” and a negotiation with new “partners”, something that alerted many users.
It was late: on Tuesday at six o’clock in the evening, Faruk Fatih Özer had left Turkey, boarding at the Istanbul airport, according to what the Thodex users’ lawyer, Oguz Evren Kiliç, told the Hürriyet newspaper, although he could not confirm the details. rumors that his destination was Thailand.
400,000 users
Thodex had been the third most popular cryptocurrency exchange in Turkey, with 400,000 registered users and a monthly transaction volume of between 8,000 and 13,000 million dollars, the jurist detailed.
Last December, Thodex claimed to have received an international license from the United States Treasury as a financial service, and the day before yesterday, just before the website was closed, it registered transactions of more than 700 million dollars in 24 hours, according to the web registry. geckoin.
Faced with the fragility of the Turkish lira, many citizens are looking for a more stable resource to invest their savings, and apart from the dollar, the euro and gold, digital money is increasingly popular: at least 20% of the Turkish population has ever used cryptocurrencies, according to public broadcaster TRT.
Thodex attracted an eminently young audience, with half of its users between 18 and 24 years old, according to data released last November.
The flight of the owner of this exchange occurs after the Central Bank of Turkey announced last Friday that as of April 30 it prohibited direct and indirect payments with cryptocurrencies due to the risks they represented.
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