Turkish Crypto Exchange Goes Offline, CEO Missing

Turkish Crypto Exchange Goes Offline, CEO Missing

Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.Sandali Handagama and Jamie CrawleyApril 22, 2021, 5:45 AM·6 min readOops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.The CEO of Turkish crypto exchange Thodex has gone missing with users filing a complaint alleging that hundreds of million of dollars have been stolen.On Wednesday, April 21, Mehmet, 34, noticed that the Turkish cryptocurrency exchange Thodex was no longer accessible: an error message was flashing across his screen. Panicking, he tried to access Thodex's main website, and there, he saw a troubling message. Thodex had halted all transactions in order to evaluate an unspecified partnership offer, the message read. The process would take about 4-5 business days, it continued, adding that users will be regularly updated. Before shutting down transactions, Thodex was trading more than $585 million in cryptocurrencies on its exchange, according to data from CoinMarketCap. A spokesperson for the data site told CoinDesk that the exchange stopped providing trading data around 17:00 UTC on April 20.Related: CoinDesk Research: Does Bitcoin Have an Energy Problem?The exchange also had about 400,000 users, 390,000 of whom were trading actively, according to state news agency Anadolu.While Thodex's website said it would be back up shortly, exchange executives are deactivating their social media