You May Find Do Kwon in Serbia- South Korean Authorities Claim
South Korea in Serbia, claims South Korea, two months after Interpol issued a red notice
Do Kwon, the failed cryptocurrency executive who engineered the US$40 billion collapse of the terraUSD and Luna tokens, is hiding in Serbia. Prosecutors in Seoul’s Southern District said they will work with Serbia to apprehend him. The collapse of the tokens in May, Kwon, 31, was charged with fraud and violations of capital markets legislation.
Interpol issued a global arrest warrant for him. The Seoul Southern District Prosecutors’ Office stated that it would cooperate with Serbia in order to detain him.
After the tokens imploded in May, Kwon, was charged with fraud and violations of capital markets law. Interpol issued an international arrest warrant for him in September. The following month, South Korean prosecutors said he had traveled to an unknown country via Dubai after leaving Singapore, where his company Terraform was based. The Interpol “Red Notice” is a request to law enforcement around the world to locate and temporarily detain a person pending extradition, surrender, or other legal action.
Although South Korea and Serbia do not have an extradition treaty, they have previously agreed to requests under the European Convention on Extradition. Mr. Kwon has previously denied that he is in hiding, but he has not revealed his current location.
“I am not ‘on the run or anything similar – for any government agency that has expressed interest in communicating, we are fully cooperating and have nothing to hide,” he tweeted in September. Prosecutors have also issued arrest warrants for five other unnamed individuals associated with the so-called stablecoin Terra and its sister token Luna. Stablecoins are intended to have a relatively fixed price and are typically pegged to a real-world commodity or currency however, Terra’s value plummeted during this year’s larger cryptocurrency crash.
The Terra Luna system collapsed in May, with the prices of both tokens plummeting to near zero and the repercussions affecting the broader crypto market. A Terra coin is now worth less than US$0.0002 after reaching a high of US$116 in April. According to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, global investors in the two coins lost an estimated US billion.
Some investors lost their life savings, and South Korean authorities have launched a number of criminal investigations into the crash.
