Interpol tonight announced the arrest of Kwon Do-hyeong, also known as Do Kwon, a disgraced crypto fugitive.
Crypto fugitive Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro, interior minister says https://t.co/pl9PshdPNb
— Financial Times (@FT) March 23, 2023
Do Kwon is the founder of TerraUSD stablecoin and Luna, two digital currencies that lost an estimated $40 billion last year.
Interpol arrested 31-year-old Kwon and another person involved at an airport in Montenegro. According to the Ministry of the Interior there, the two used forged documents to travel to Dubai.
As Minister of the Interior @filip_adzicannounced earlier today, two citizens, Kwon Do Hyeong and Hon Chang Joon, have been detained and taken to the Podgorica Public Prosecutor’s Office under criminal charges for the offense of document forgery under (1/3) pic.twitter.com/iS0rRs2Fwv
— mupCG (@MupCg) March 23, 2023
“He was arrested at the airport with false documents and is wanted by several countries, including the US, South Korea and Singapore,” Montenegrin Interior Minister Filip Adžić wrote in a statement. Facebook message.
The arrest is the culmination of a months-long international search for Do Kwon. South Korea had asked Interpol to issue a “red notice” allowing other countries to arrest Kwon.
According to the New York times US prosecutors in the Southern District of New York filed criminal charges against Mr. Kwon a few hours after his arrest. The charges include wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy to defraud and market manipulation.
Who is Do Kwon?
Kwon graduated from Stanford and briefly worked at Apple before designing his two cryptocurrencies. TerraUSD was a “stablecoin”, supposed to maintain a constant $1 price while Luna’s value fluctuated.
Between 2021 and early 2022, Luna was valued at $40 billion. Kwon became very popular. His fans called themselves ‘Lunatics’.
But Luna eventually crashed – the value was wiped out overnight. The crash caused a domino effect on other popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Soon after, Kwon went into hiding.
Kwon claimed on Twitter that he “wasn’t on the run”.
I’m not “on the run” or anything like that – for any government agency that has expressed an interest in communicating, we are fully cooperating and have nothing to hide
— Doe Kwon? (@stablekwon) September 17, 2022
But according to CNNdoes a South Korean court have one arrest warrant for Kwon last September. He would be in Serbia.
