He told the court that he had grown his beard to his collarbone and shaved his head. He said that when he learned of the prosecutor's indictment – that his brother and sister were accused of fraud, that they would be put on trial within a month, and that without Ozer they would probably take the blame for Thodex's downfall and spend the rest of their lives. Living in prison, he had a wild idea: If every claimant was paid, would a crime have really occurred? He told magistrates that he was in fact carrying Thodex's cold wallet, although he claims he does not remember how much was in it. He asked Arslan to help him repay nearly 2,000 plaintiffs who lost their money.
And they did, in part. In all, during his escape, he paid nearly 185 million liras ($10 million at the time) to more than 1,000 claimants. As Ozer tells it, when the cold wallet became empty, he threw it into the Ionian Sea.
When he talked about his use of other people's accounts to trade cryptocurrencies – the action at the heart of the case – he began to sound a little defiant and condescending: “Startup founders bear all the responsibilities, as the nature of startups requires.” He emphasized that they do not have any authority in the company and cannot access these accounts. “There is no chaos or irregularities. Moreover, I am neither the first nor the last nor the only person doing arbitrage in the cryptocurrency market.
Toward the end of his speech, Özer's frustrations seemed to turn to bitterness and arrogance. He faced the judges and said it was “ridiculous to think that the intelligence level of the person who devised this stupid escape plan” was the same as the criminal mastermind who was allegedly able to deceive Turkish financial regulators for four years. “I am smart enough to lead any organization on Earth,” Ozer said. He then asked Erslan to pull out a picture of a cartoon mocking the court. He seemed upset, so the chief judge ordered him to remove it.
The verdict was delivered quietly on a quiet Thursday in September 2023, to a nearly empty courtroom. Ozer stood and quietly read the lyrics of a Turkish folk song called “The End of the Road is Visible.”
The Chief Justice issued the same sentence to Guven, Serap and Ozer: 11,196 years in prison – on charges of creating and managing a criminal organization and laundering assets. Most of the other defendants were released. This was the longest ruling in Turkish history, as it was issued a month before the centenary of the founding of the Republic.
Faruk Fatih Ozer It has become a model for cryptocurrency crime, but it has also become a symptomatic representation of a particular economic era — and the lengths people will go to escape that era. For the Turkish regime, it was less an opposition than an unfortunate product of flawed economic policies. In light of this, the strict sentence is not only punishment for a crime, but also to highlight decades of embarrassing failures, ones that were made clear to the entire country on the day Osiris disappeared.
So perhaps it is not surprising that Türkiye remains a haven for cryptocurrencies. In the year following Thodex's bankruptcy, inflation in the country reached a 24-year high of 85.5 percent. Commodity prices have nearly doubled, as has the percentage of Turks who own bitcoin, ether, and other currencies. In terms of trade volume, the country ranks fourth globally, after the United States, the United Kingdom and India. After decades of witnessing the decline in the value of their currency, the faltering of their businesses and their problems, the Turkish people will not give up the dream so easily. Earlier this year, the country's finance minister said the government was finalizing new regulations on cryptocurrencies, “to make the industry safer and eliminate potential risks.” So, even though Özer battled an authoritarian regime and lost—whether because he was a total believer in the gospel of decentralization, or because he was a naïve child, or because he was a cynical con man, or some combination of all three—the fires of economic economics were still burning. The revolution he helped encourage is not going away anytime soon.
Gina Unleashed Freelance journalist from San Francisco currently based in Istanbul.
Additional reporting by Berel Eski, Gulshah Karadag and Vladimir Karadag.
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