(NewsNation) — Faruk Fatih Özer, the founder of a failed cryptocurrency exchange, has been sentenced to 11,196 years in prison for defrauding investors of millions of dollars.
A Turkish court handed down the sentence late Thursday, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency. Özer was the man behind Thodex, the first global crypto exchange based in Turkey before it folded in 2021.
Users on the platform lost over $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency when it blocked them from pulling out funds, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Özer denied the accusations and said he was “smart enough to manage all the institutions in the world,” state media reported.
“If I were to establish a criminal organization, I would not act so amateurishly,” he told the court, according to Anadolu.
In 2021, Özer fled to Albania before getting caught in August 2022. He was extradited to Turkey in April.
Despite the extremely long prison sentence, it could have been worse. Prosecutors were seeking 40,562 years in jail for the charges Özer was facing, according to AFP.
His two siblings also received 11,000-year sentences for their involvement.