After living on the run for six months, the most likely father of the Terra system, Do Kwon, was arrested in Montenegro. South Korean authorities have provided visual confirmation, but are awaiting a fingerprint scan. The US is seeking his extradition.
Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon was eventually captured in Montenegro. At least the Montenegrin police have captured a person believed to be him. He was arrested at Podgorica airport with forged documents.
Will the law finally catch up with Do Kwon?
Filip Adzic, Minister of the Interior of Montenegro he tweeted regarding it today, that Montenegrin police have arrested a person suspected of being Terra frontman Do Kwon. It is not clear whether he wanted to enter or leave Montenegro. Podgorica is the capital of the country. South Korean authorities claimed in December that Kwon was hiding in Serbia. According to DL News, the Serbian police have already tracked him down, so it is possible that he tried to escape from the Serbian authorities by entering Montenegro.
South Korea’s Yonhap news channel reported that South Korea’s National Police Agency has already verified the age, nationality and name of the man arrested by the Montenegrin police and confirmed his identity with the photographic information. They are still waiting for the fingerprint data from the Montenegrin authorities.
40 billion dollars became camphor because of it
Kwon is the CEO of Terraform Labs, which designed the Terra blockchain. Terra collapsed in May 2022 when the network’s algorithmic stablecoin, UST, lost its peg and went into a “death spiral”. More than $40 billion in market capitalization disappeared from the markets.
Kwon, who refused to cooperate with the criminal investigation, fled South Korea for Singapore shortly following the Terra crash. Interpol issued a red alert once morest him in September, so he is wanted in 195 countries. Despite this, Kwon insisted that he was not running away and remained active on Twitter.
He was indicted in America
Federal prosecutors in New York charged Do Kwon with fraud hours following police arrested him, reports a Coindesk. He is also under investigation in South Korea and is on Interpol’s wanted list in connection with the Terra crash. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has already filed a civil lawsuit once morest him, claiming in February that he had misled investors.
Kwon was charged with conspiracy to defraud, stock fraud, securities fraud, online fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation. A spokesperson confirmed to CoinDesk that the Justice Department will seek his extradition to the United States.
Did Kwon fool everyone?
According to the filing, Kwon made a number of “false and misleading statements of material fact” over several years in reference to Terraform Labs-related TV appearances and the company’s tweets.
With others is colluded to defraud buyers of cryptocurrencies issued by TFLHel, misleading these customers regarding the effectiveness of the algorithmic mechanism that supposedly ensures the stability of the UST exchange rate – statedak in one of the charges.
In addition, he contacted representatives of an American trading and investment firm to ask for help “to change the market price of UST”. According to CoinDesk, that company was Jump Crypto.
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