In a grim twist that reads like the final scene of a true-crime thriller, Faruk Fatih Özer — the 29-year-old mastermind behind Turkey’s largest-ever cryptocurrency fraud — was found dead on Saturday morning in his cell at Tekirdağ F-Type High Security Prison. Authorities say he hanged himself in the bathroom.
Özer, once considered the genius of Turkey’s booming crypto industry, was serving a whopping 11,196-year life sentence for leading to the collapse of Thodex, a Turkish cryptocurrency exchange. This platform becaame defunct in April 2021, taking with it the savings of more than 400,000 users.
How He Became The Crypto God
Özer’s life story feels like a movie script. He never finished high school and started coding on his own. By 2017, he had built Thodex from scratch. In just four years, he became one of Turkey’s biggest names in crypto.
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But on April 21, 2021, everything changed. Thodex abruptly froze withdrawals. Days later, Özer disappeared, fleeing first to Albania with what prosecutors say were hundreds of millions in stolen digital assets. Panic spread across social media as users realized their life savings were gone forever.
Estimates of the total loss vary wildly — from $24 million to as much as $2.6 billion, according to blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis. Prosecutors traced roughly 253.7 million Turkish lira in crypto flowing directly into wallets tied to Özer and his inner circle.
Captured, Convicted… Then Silence
After a 16-month international hunt, Albanian police arrested Özer in August 2022. He was extradited to Turkey. In September 2023, an Istanbul court sentenced him, along with his siblings Güven and Serap, for running a company built on money laundering and fraud.
But justice never truly caught up. Most victims of the fraud saw little to no recovery of their funds. And now, with Özer’s death behind bars, any hope of uncovering hidden assets or secret accounts has died with him. As investigators comb through prison logs and security footage, one thing remains painfully clear: in the volatile world of cryptocurrency, fortunes can vanish in seconds and innocent people can suffer a lot.
