Hong Kong
CNN
โ
Do Kwon, a disgraced tycoon behind the collapse of the TerraUSD and Luna coins that clouded crypto asset market in May, he is hiding in Serbia, according to South Korean prosecutors seeking to detain him.
Kwon, a South Korean national, traveled from Singapore, where he lived while running blockchain platform Terraform Labs, to Dubai and eventually to Serbia, a spokesperson for the Seoul Southern District Prosecutor's Office told CNN on Tuesday.
The office became aware that Kwon was in Serbia in November and was tracking him, according to the spokesman, adding that he was seeking help from the Serbian government to arrest and extradite him.
In September, a South Korean court issued a warrant for him, after investors accused him of fraud in the aftermath of his company's collapse.
Kwon has been charged with fraud and violations of South Korea's capital markets law. The said in october that he did not believe the charges were legitimate, adding that they were "politically motivated."
The crypto developer has repeated claimed on Twitter that he was not โon the runโ but refused to disclose his whereabouts due to concerns about his personal safety.
Terraform Labs was behind the โstablecoinโ TerraUSD, which was theoretically meant to maintain a price point of $1, and its sister coin Luna. Both coins lost much of their value in a matter of days in May, wiping out tens of billions of dollars in value from the crypto market and triggering panic throughout the speculative sector.
The collapse of the two pegged currencies kicked off the so-called โcrypto winter,โ from which the industry was struggling to recover even as it experienced another major hit from the cryptocurrency. FTX crypto exchange crash in November. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas on Monday after US prosecutors filed criminal charges against him.
โ Jon Sarlin contributed to this report.
