Do Kwon Gets Arrested
The South Korean crypto entrepreneur, Do Kwon who was known to be the person behind the $40 billion-worth explosion of the digital tokens TerraUSD and Luna last year, has now been arrested in Montenegro hours after he was charged with fraud in the United States.
US authorities accuse Kwon of defrauding cryptocurrency users by “deceiving those individuals about aspects of the Terra blockchain, including its technology and the extent to which it had been adopted by users.” This information was disclosed by the 12-page indictment released last Thursday.
The eight criminal charges that the Korean crypto fugitive — Knowing is now facing include securities, commodities, and wire fraud. According to the prosecution, Kwon made repeated false statements in a TV interview in October 2019 and a social media post the following year. When questioned about Kwon’s most recent arrest, his attorney had no response.
Kwon’s arrest was made official by Montenegro’s interior minister Filip Adzic, who claimed on Twitter that “the former cryptocurrency king” had been detained by police at Podgorica Airport with fraudulent documents. The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, on the other hand, stated that it will seek Kwon’s extradition but declined to speak further on the issue.
The Hunt for the Korean Fugitive
The fall of the TerraUSD coin was one of the biggest narrative twists in the crypto market last year. Its catastrophic crash is said to have sent several of the industry’s top players to their deaths. Do Kwon, the co-founder of Terraform Labs, was charged with fraud and violations of capital markets law in his home country at the time. In addition, once officials were unable to locate him, an international manhunt was launched.
Following that, Korean authorities reported that Kwon had left Singapore, where Terraform was located, and traveled to an undisclosed nation, believed to be Serbia, through Dubai. Adzic stated that they are still awaiting official confirmation of the identification of the Man who was recently detained. It should be noted that his South Korean passport has also been withdrawn.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has previously been suing Kwon and Terra for allegedly organizing a cryptocurrency scheme that resulted in billions of dollars in losses by selling a variety of digital assets that were not properly registered with regulators. In addition, they stated that the scam occurred between April 2018 and May 2022.
