What it was
Thodex was one of the larger cryptocurrency exchanges operating in Turkey when the lira was losing value quickly and Turkish savers were moving into bitcoin in numbers. It was a custodial exchange: customers sent money in, the company held the coins, and the balance existed as a number in an account.
That arrangement is what made the ending possible. In April 2021 the site went offline. On 22 April 2021 Anadolu Agency reported that a criminal investigation had been opened and that MASAK, Turkey's financial crimes watchdog, had blocked all of the company's bank accounts over alleged aggravated fraud. The founder had already left the country.
We could not establish the company's legal form or its founding year from a record we were able to open, so this entry records the structure as undocumented and leaves the year out rather than guessing at either. The thodex.com domain now serves an unrelated site and is not linked here.
What is disputed
The size of the loss is contested and has been from the start. The prosecutor's indictment put the damage to customers at 356 million Turkish lira, about $13.2 million at the time. Local media have carried figures as high as $2 billion, which Daily Sabah notes has since been disputed. Daily Sabah also reports the prosecution's claim that over 250 million lira of customer assets, worth about $30 million at the time, was moved to three accounts as the founder left. These are not the same number and we do not average them.
On the record
Faruk Fatih Özer was arrested in Albania on 30 August 2022 on an Interpol red notice and extradited to Turkey in April 2023. On 7 September 2023 an Istanbul court, the Anatolian 9th High Criminal Court, found him and two co-defendants guilty of aggravated fraud, leading a criminal organisation and money laundering, and sentenced each of them to 11,196 years in prison along with a judicial fine of 135 million lira. Prosecutors had asked for 40,562 years.
That conviction is the finding this entry's fraud tag rests on. It is a Turkish criminal court, and it is a conviction, not a charge.