Key takeaways:
- The co-founder of the now-defunct crypto and forex platform OmegaPro, Andreas Szakacs, was detained in Turkey in July.
- Szakacs, a Swedish national who moved to Turkey and changed his identity to Emre Avci, has refuted the accusations.
The co-founder of the now-defunct crypto and forex platform OmegaPro, Andreas Szakacs, was detained in Turkey in July. He is charged with scamming investors out of $4 billion via a Ponzi scheme involving cryptocurrencies.
Szakacs is suspected of defrauding investors by promising enormous returns through OmegaPro’s “automated trading” algorithm, amassing their money, and then freezing their accounts, according to a report published in local Turkish media on August 22.
Szakacs, a Swedish national who moved to Turkey and changed his identity to Emre Avci, has refuted the accusations.
The anonymous information that led to Szakacs’s arrest was confirmed by Dutch national Abdul Mohaghegh, who says he represents 3,000 investors who lost a total of $103 million to OmegaPro. The tip came on June 28.
OmegaPro was a crypto and FX investment company that was founded in 2019 and had its headquarters in Dubai. It provided clients with a range of paid investment packages that could yield returns of up to 300%.
On the OmegaPro platform, users narrate stories of their first little deposits that yielded rapid profits. Demands for additional funding followed, and eventually user accounts were shut.
The company allegedly stopped accepting withdrawals on November 22, 2022, the same day as the crypto exchange FTX collapsed, and started closing user accounts on November 7, 2022.
Regulatory fraud warnings on the platform were apparently sent by a number of jurisdictions, including France, Belgium, Spain, and Peru, prior to the firm’s collapse. Users outside of the United States are said to have been its primary focus.
Authorities in Turkey confiscated 32 crypto cold wallets, numerous mobile devices, and PCs. Turkish police tracked transactions totalling more than $160 million, according to local news site Birgun, despite Szakacs not giving them any information that would have given them access to the wallets.
Local detectives surmise that OmegaPro’s funding had a direct connection to the notorious OneCoin crypto scam, which duped investors of $4 billion.
In 2015, OneCoin—founded in 2014—was shown to be a scam. During its two-year operation, it defrauded investors of approximately $4 billion in assets.
Gilbert Armenta, the boyfriend of the scheme’s founder Ruja Ignatova, attorney Mark Scott, the former head of legal and compliance, and William Morro, who was purportedly connected to Armenta, are among the top brass members who have been criminally prosecuted in the US for their roles in the scheme.
On June 26, the US Department of State raised the prize to $5 million (a $4.75 million increase from the initial $250,000 reward) for information on Ignatova’s whereabouts that would result in her arrest and conviction.
