Thodex

» see thodex.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

most of the graves on this site happened somewhere else and reached me late. this one happened here, in my language, on the evening news, in april 2021. i did not have money on thodex. it did not take much in turkey that spring to be one step away from somebody who did.

the company was founded in 2017 as koineks teknoloji and took the thodex name in march 2020, when it started going after users outside turkey. it was an exchange in the ordinary sense. you put lira in and bought bitcoin or dogecoin, and the balance sat with them rather than with you. the turkish crypto market in 2020 and 2021 was enormous and almost entirely unregulated, with inflation doing the recruiting. thodex was one of the biggest names in it.

between 15 march and 15 april 2021 it ran a giveaway. sign up, receive free dogecoin. dogecoin was in the middle of the strangest run of its life that spring, and the campaign pulled an enormous number of new accounts onto a platform that was holding other people's money. by the time it ended the exchange had around 391,000 active users.

the state moved first, and not against thodex. on 16 april 2021 the central bank banned the use of crypto to pay for goods and services, effective at the end of that month. five days later the exchange stopped.

~ the case file ~

~ the day it stopped ~

on 20 april, the day the dogecoin crowd had labeled dogeday, the price jumped and thodex users started finding that their transactions would not go through. trading halted that day. on the 21st the accounts themselves stopped opening and the site carried a notice about temporary maintenance work. a statement the same day said a partnership offer was being evaluated and that what was being written about the company was untrue.

faruk fatih özer was on a flight from istanbul to albania. prosecutors would later say he left with roughly two billion dollars in customer crypto, a figure never confirmed and that other counts put higher. the first criminal complaints came from 572 people. the account list was 391,000.

there was no hack, no exploit, no smart contract that behaved unexpectedly. an exchange is a company holding your money and promising to give it back. thodex is what happens when the person running it decides not to, and that failure mode has nothing to do with cryptography at all. it is the oldest one there is, wearing new clothes.

~ the long tail ~

an interpol red notice went out. özer was found in albania on 30 august 2022, more than a year later, and fought extradition until the durres appeal court sent him back. the plane landed at istanbul airport on 20 april 2023, two years to the week after he had left. on 7 september 2023 a court in istanbul sentenced him to 11,196 years, along with two of his siblings, for aggravated fraud and for running a criminal organization.

the sentence is a number rather than a punishment. turkish courts multiply per victim, so eleven thousand years is what 391,000 accounts look like once you do the arithmetic. on 1 november 2025 özer was found dead in his cell at tekirdağ f-type prison. his lawyer said he had withdrawn from everybody in the months before, family included.

the money has not come back. what did come was regulation. turkey moved quickly after 2021 to license exchanges and to put custody rules in place, which is the ordinary sequence everywhere. a country gets the rules once somebody has demonstrated why they were needed.

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