Koineks Teknoloji A.Ş, known online as Thodex, is a defunct Turkey based cryptocurrency exchange founded by Faruk Fatih Özer.
[2] It had 391,000 users when it froze in April 2021[1][3][4] and an estimated $2 billion in money from investors when the owner fled Turkey and shutdown the company.
That year, Thodex was also licensed by Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as a Money Service Business (MSB).
[9] In the meantime, Faruk Fatih Özer, the owner Thodex, left Turkey[2] for Tirana, Albania with $2 billion of cryptocurrency in his possession.
[12] The prosecutors also requested that the Cyber Crimes Directorate establish contact with foreign exchanges to determine if Özer had sent Bitcoins to their Binance address and if so whether those could be frozen/confiscated.
[citation needed] Nevertheless, twenty-one of the suspects including Özer were indicted for three separate crimes and faced up to 40,564 years of collective prison sentences.
[14][15] The court determined that the suspects had converted their clients' money to cryptocurrency and gold and that they had lured in their victims with deceptive advertising.