Billion Dollar Rug Pull Likely After Turkish BTC Exchange Goes Dark

A billion dollar rug pull possibility occurred after a Turkish BTC exchange abruptly went dark and halted trading as we can see more in our latest BTC news today.

The Turkish exchange halted trading overnight and according to reports, a billion dollar rug pull could be in question with the locked-up funds standing between $2 and 10 billion. Turkish crypto exchange Thodex halted trading this morning without any notice before locked up funds of 391,000 active traders. The exchange which operated since 2017, shared a statement on Twitter saying that there was an unspecified outside investment that required suspension of trading for 4-5 days.

🇬🇧 If billions of dollars worth of #crypto were "lost" and then sold, what could be the impact of this incident on global markets?

Can we call this a "Turkish Mt. Gox Incident"?

— Av. Oğuz Evren Kılıç (@OguzEvrenKilic) April 21, 2021

This could also be a scam according to lawyer Oguz Evren Kilic who is lives in Ankara and filed a legal complaint against the exchange. Thodax CEO Faruk Fatih Ozer left the company last evening according to police records that were shared with the lawyer and even deleted his social media accounts. The company cut off all customer support, as Oguz Evren noted:

“This is all terrifying.”

Evren noted that the total funds locked in the exchange amount to $2-10 billion which is a wide range that will be clearer over the next few days. Today’s investigation by the prosecutors’ office is the first step in the legal process which found that there could be some money in the bank accounts of the exchange and its owner. Evren continued:

 “But we do not know the exact amount and whether that will be enough for everyone.”

Between March and April of this year, before the DOGE frenzy started, the exchange ran a successful marketing campaign that involved rewarding every new sign-up with 150 DOGE and thousands of users joined with the trading volumes surging to a record of $1.37 billion which is the highest daily figure over the past year.

@thodexglobal
Why is, since April 14th, DOGE/USDT fixed to 0.1145750 in your exchange?
Why don't you allow my coins to be transferred?
If there is a maintenance, only for DOGE why cant I transfer my Holochains?#doge #dogecoin #thodex

— Kaya Dinar (@KayaDinar) April 19, 2021

In what should have raised alarm bells, the exchange sold the cryptocurrency at a discounted fixed rate of $0.11. Then, a few days later it all came to a sudden halt with traders being able to buy crypto but not sell it. The disappearing of the exchange came at quite an interesting time for Turkish exchanges because the Turkish government already said that crypto payments will be banned. It also bared fintech companies from getting involved in the crypto space which mostly affected the foreign crypto exchanges that rely on the domestic ones to operate in the country.