Do Kwon, a cryptofugitive, was apprehended in Montenegro, according to Interpol.
The man detained in Montenegro, according to Interpol, is Kwon Do-hyeong, better known as Do Kwon, the disgraced founder of a defunct cryptocurrency startup who is sought in South Korea and the US on fraud and other offenses.
Kwon, a citizen of South Korea, established the blockchain infrastructure that powers the TerraUSD stablecoin and Luna, its sister coin. In May 2022, both coins experienced a rapid decline in value that erased nearly $40 billion from the cryptocurrency market and caused panic among investors.
According to Interpol’s national central bureau in Seoul, a fingerprint match allowed for the identification of Kwon.
Filip Adi, the interior minister for Montenegro, posted on social media the day before that a man who was allegedly Kwon had been detained in the nation’s capital Podgorica.
He was detained at the airport using fake identification, and the USA, South Korea, and Singapore are among the nations that are looking for him, according to Adi in a Facebook post.
When operating the blockchain platform Terraform Labs, Kwon was stationed in Singapore. In December, Seoul prosecutors informed CNN that the crypto entrepreneur was thought to be in Serbia, where he had gone into hiding after traveling from Singapore to Dubai.
A South Korean court issued an arrest warrant for Kwon in September after the collapse of his company led to accusations of fraud from local investors.
Kwon is accused of fraud and violations of the capital markets law in South Korea. He said that the accusations were “politically motivated” and that he didn’t think the charges were true in an interview from October.
The developer of the cryptocurrency has frequently insisted on Twitter that he was not “on the run,” but he has steadfastly refused to say where he is because he is concerned for his safety.
The stablecoin TerraUSD, created by Terraform Labs, was designed to maintain a price of $1 in theory. The so-called “crypto winter,” which the sector was still working to recover from when FTX’s collapse in November dealt it another devastating blow, began with the failure of TerraUSD and Luna, two linked coins.
