I have been following the trajectory of Faruk Fatih Ozer from the beginning, when Thodex seemed to be Turkey's biggest crypto success. The guy managed to attract over 400,000 users and move billions in daily volume. It looked promising, but then they discovered that 2.6 billion had disappeared from deposits. It became one of the biggest exchange rug pulls of the decade, according to Chainalysis.

What happened next was typical of someone trying to escape: Ozer fled to Albania, but was captured in 2022 and extradited in 2023. At the time, he tried to defend himself by saying he was a visionary who failed due to regulatory ambiguity. But the Turkish justice system didn't buy that story. In September 2023, he and the brothers received a heavy sentence: 11,196 years in prison each. Yes, you read that right – almost 11,000 years.

Now, according to reports, Faruk was found dead in a solitary cell at Tekirdağ maximum-security prison. His death closes one of the darkest chapters of the Turkish crypto boom and serves as a reminder of how dangerously thin the line between innovation and crime in the crypto space is. Cases like this, with such severe sentences and tragic outcomes, show that the consequences for fraud in exchanges are no joke.