Serbia has become a likely location for crypto fugitive Do Kwon, the 31-year-old fallen businessman facing charges in his native South Korea for the removal of $60 billion of digital assets he created.
The prosecutors' office in Seoul said Monday that reports locate the progenitor of the collapsed TerraUSD and Moon the tokens on the landlocked Balkan nation "are not fake." Those reports also said that South Korea is in the process of requesting Serbia's cooperation. A South Korean Justice Ministry official declined to comment.
Kwon's location remained unclear after authorities in mid-September issued a warrant on complaints that include violations of the capital markets law. South Korea has stripped him of his passport and said that Kwon is the subject of an Interpol red notice.
Prosecutors in October indicated that Kwon had flown to dubai probably as a stopover for destinations unknown after leaving Singapore, where his Terraform Labs project was based.
The TerraUSD stablecoin was intended to have a constant value of $1 through a combination of algorithms and trading incentives involving sister token Luna. The building blew up in May, exacerbating a $2 trillion crypto market rout and contributing to the downfall of a variety of digital asset teams.
Kwon has denied any wrongdoing and Terraform Labs has said that capital markets law does not apply to crypto tokens. Neither he nor a Terraform Labs spokesperson immediately responded to a request for comment on the latest developments.
The burning question is why Kwon would be in Serbia and what that could mean about his chances of being extradited. South Korea does not have a bilateral extradition treaty with Serbia, but both nations have agreed to the European Convention on Extradition.
Exactly what caused Kwon's project to implode remains a mystery. The US authorities are probe possible ties to Sam Bankman-Fried, whose FTX trading and exchange house, Alameda Research, recently filed for bankruptcy.
the New York Times has reported that US federal prosecutors are examining whether Bankman-Fried participated in market manipulation by orchestrating transactions that led to the collapse of TerraUSD and Luna.
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