An individual traveling with false documents who is suspected of being cryptocurrency fugitive Do Kwon has been arrested in the Balkan country of Montenegro, according to a Twitter post from Montenegro’s minister of the interior.
Kwon, a South Korean national, is the founder of the failed crypto stablecoin Terra and its sister token, Luna, which imploded spectacularly last spring, wiping out close to $60 billion in investor funds and sending the crypto market spiraling into what’s now become a crypto winter. In September, South Korean law enforcement issued a warrant for his arrest on charges that he broke the nation’s capital markets law. But authorities were unable to determine his whereabouts.
Weeks later, when he could not be found in Singapore, where he was said to reside, international law enforcement agency Interpol issued a “red notice,” asking police worldwide to detain Kwon.
Although dethroned crypto king Kwon was geographically elusive, he could be found on Twitter throughout the months-long search, championing a revived version of his Terra-Luna token system, and opining on last fall’s shocking collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, led by fellow persona non grata Sam Bankman-Fried, who is facing charges of his own. Kwon has insisted he was not hiding or fleeing from police, but rather withholding his location for safety concerns.
Montenegro officials, who arrested the suspected Kwon at an airport in the capital city of Podgorica, say they are awaiting confirmation of his identity. The country shares its northern border with Serbia—which is where South Korean intelligence believed Kwon to have been since December, and which has no extradition treaty with South Korea.
Montenegro also has no extradition treaty with South Korea. But it has an agreement with the United States dating back to 1901.
No criminal charges have been filed on U.S. grounds against Kwon, meaning extradition may not be mandated. However, U.S. officials have been turning up the heat on Kwon recently as part of a government-wide crypto crackdown. Last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought civil charges against Kwon for “orchestrating a multibillion dollar crypto asset securities fraud involving an algorithmic stablecoin and other crypto asset securities.” And this month, the Justice Department began probing Kwon’s culpability in Terra-Luna’s demise.
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