The Turkish cryptocurrency exchange Thodex stopped trading without any warning on Wednesday, along with which 391 thousand active customers lost access to their wallets.
Thodex has been operating on the market since 2017. Yesterday, it posted an announcement on Twitter that it would need to stop trading for 4-5 business days to attract external investment. This is supposedly necessary to transfer a stake in the company to a new partner, and the investment will help improve the customer service experience. So far, the situation only causes irritation and concerns of users who suddenly lost access to their money. The exchange does not provide any other information about the proposed transaction.
According to CoinGecko, last Friday, Thodex trading volumes exceeded $1.2 billion, tripling from the previous week's values. Some users on social media reported that their investments on Thodex were "stuck", while others went to complain about the popular Turkish consumer protection forum Sikayetvar.
"This may well turn out to be fraud," Evren Kilic, a lawyer at Oguz, who filed a lawsuit against the exchange, said in a conversation with Decrypt.
Citing a police report, he also said that Thodex CEO Farouk Fatih Ozer left the country on Tuesday evening and deleted his social media accounts. In addition, the company stopped all types of customer support. Kilic estimates the amount of funds remaining on Thodex at $ 2-10 billion. A more precise amount will be known in the coming days. The investigation established "the presence of some money in the bank accounts of the exchange and its owners."
"But we do not know the exact amount, and whether it will be enough for everyone," the lawyer added.
Since March 15, the exchange has been conducting a campaign to reward new customers with 150 Dogecoin coins for a month. According to reports, this attracted thousands of users, which contributed to the establishment of a new record for trading volumes. At the same time, users claim that since April 14, Dogecoin has been trading on Thodex at a fixed price of $0.1145,750, while on world exchanges its price has risen above $0.40. The exchange did not allow the cryptocurrency acquired in this way to be withdrawn, referring to the maintenance of the wallet, which is very similar to the tactic of attracting additional investments before the exit scam.
It is also noteworthy that after four years of operation, Thodex began to experience interruptions. Last week, the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey announced a ban on cryptocurrencies as a means of payment. The ban comes into force on April 30 and, according to media reports, will force payment services often used to top up exchange wallets to stop working with platforms for exchanging digital currencies. The authorities cited the irreversibility of cryptocurrency transactions and the inherent risks of fraud as one of the main reasons for their decision.
Shortly before that, there was a surge of interest in cryptocurrencies in the country against the background of a sharp depreciation of the national currency. In the local peer-to-peer exchange market, the price of bitcoin temporarily rose to $100,000.