TIRANA, Apr. 18, 2022 – Albania’s High Court has court ruled to allow the extradition of Fatih Ozer to face a trial in his homeland of Turkey, where he is wanted for allegedly scamming nearly 400,000 people out of millions dollars through a cryptocurrency exchange.
Ozer was arrested last year by Albanian police as he was hiding in a vacation town in southern Albania. He had been fighting extradition to his native land as he sat in a high security Tirana jail.
Before the arrest, Turkish authorities had long suspected 29-year-old Ozer was hiding in Albania, where police have been looking for him for more than a year, including posting wanted posters with his photo and conducting several fruitless operations to capture him. He was helped by local criminals in central Albania to hide, police said, but they ultimately caught up with him through intercepting the locals phone calls.
Ozer is wanted internationally by Interpol Ankara on a warrant by the High Court of Istanbul on the criminal offenses of “creating a criminal organization” and “fraud with serious consequences.” Turkish prosecutors are pursuing jail sentences totaling thousands of years for the founders and executives of Thodex, the company Ozer led.
Thodex was part of the cryptocurrency boom driven by local investors seeking to protect their savings from soaring inflation and an unstable currency.
In 2021, Ozer disappeared following the shutdown of the platform. Earlier he had made a statement from an unknown location in which he promised to repay investors and to return to Turkey to face justice at a later date.
