Cryptofugitive Do Kwon has been apprehended in Montenegro, according to Interpol.
Kwon Do-hyeong, commonly known as Do Kwon, the disgraced founder of a failed cryptocurrency startup who is sought in South Korea and the US on suspicion of fraud and other offenses, according to Interpol, was detained in Montenegro.
The blockchain architecture that powers the TerraUSD stablecoin and its companion coin Luna was created by South Korean native Kwon. In May 2022, both coins experienced rapid value declines that erased nearly $40 billion from the cryptocurrency market and sent shockwaves across the speculative community.
A fingerprint match allowed Interpol’s national central bureau in Seoul to establish Kwon’s identity, the agency told CNN on Friday.
A day earlier, Filip Adi, the interior minister of Montenegro, said on social media that a man thought to be Kwon had been detained in the nation’s capital Podgorica.
Adi wrote on Facebook that the man was detained at the airport with fake identification and was sought by many nations, including the USA, South Korea, and Singapore.
Kwon managed the blockchain platform Terraform Laboratories while residing in Singapore. In December, Seoul prosecutors informed CNN that the crypto entrepreneur was thought to be hiding out in Serbia after departing Singapore via Dubai. A South Korean court issued an arrest warrant for Kwon in September after the country’s investors accused him of fraud following the failure of his company.
Fraud and violations of the capital markets law in South Korea are the charges brought against Kwon. In October, he stated that he didn’t think the accusations were true and that they were “politically driven.”
The crypto engineer has frequently insisted on Twitter that he is not “on the run,” but he has declined to say where he is because he is concerned for his safety.
TerraUSD, a stablecoin that was conceptually intended to maintain a $1 price point, was created by Terraform Labs. The so-called “crypto winter,” from which the sector was still trying to recover when it suffered another devastating blow with the failure of crypto exchange FTX in November, was initiated by the collapse of TerraUSD and Luna, two linked coins.
