The country of Turkey stopped the chief of one of the country's biggest cryptocurrency firms after launching a manhunt for the founder of another exchange, who ran away with $2 Billion worth of crypto.
The volume of crypto continued to rise 10 to 20 percent between november and March, as Turks bought massive amounts of crypto during a steep drop of the lira currency. But the market started to crash when the Istanbul-based exchange platform named "Thodex" started scamming people. The owner Faruk Fatih Ozer flew to either Thailand or Albania with a reported $2 billion in robbed crypto.
The problems at Thodex started after it ran a promotion offering Dogecoins at one-fourth the price the coin was selling for. Thodex users later complained that it was a scam, and prevented them from re-selling the coins at their full value.
The next day, Thodex shut down while holding investments from nearly 400,000 users. Turkey issued an international arrest warrant and stopped dozens of Thodex employees by raiding into their homes and arresting them.
After the shutdown of the Thodex exchange, many more turkish crypto exchange platforms were also shutdown. Data from Chainalysis and Kaiko analytics firms show the daily volume of all crypto purchases in Turkey rising from $60 million to $722 million each day. This makes Turkey the fifth-biggest crypto market in the world.
The situation from Turkey created ripples across the global-crypto-market, as bitcoin's value slipped under $50,000 after reaching $57,000 at the start of the week.
Turkish prosecutors accused Ozer of "aggravated fraud and founding a criminal organisation"
