A crypto fugitive’s very public life while on the run

Not long after the South Korean government issued a warrant for his arrest, Do Kwon, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who became a fugitive, joined a livestream with two popular crypto podcasters.

They had arranged for Kwon to speak alongside Martin Shkreli, a former pharmaceutical executive who was sentenced to seven years in prison for fraud. “Hey, Do,” Shkreli said on the stream in November. “I just wanted to let you know that jail’s not that bad. It’s not the worst thing ever.”

Kwon smiled and nodded. “Good to know,” he said.

On Thursday, Kwon, 31, was arrested in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, as he and a travel companion tried to board a private flight. They were apprehended after using forged Costa Rican passports, according to authorities, and they were also carrying travel documents from Belgium that appeared to be falsified.

The arrest was the culmination of a remarkable tale of international intrigue and crypto industry chutzpah. Kwon became a target of criminal investigators in at least three countries after two cryptocurrencies issued by his company, Terraform Labs, collapsed virtually overnight.

The crash set off a market meltdown that tanked the prices of popular digital coins such as bitcoin and ether and sent the crypto industry into crisis. In just a few days, Kwon went from industry luminary to industry villain. Some investors in his virtual currencies lost their life savings.

After his business collapsed, Kwon traveled around Europe and Asia, from Singapore to Serbia to Montenegro, while insisting on Twitter that he was not “‘on the run’ or anything similar.”

Even as the global authorities sought his arrest, Kwon gave interviews to reporters and podcasters, and he tried to revive his crypto business with a new digital coin. In a brief call with The New York Times early this month, Kwon said he hadn’t “declined requests” to share his location with the authorities.

“They obviously know where I am,” he said.

His arrest is now poised to set up a battle over his extradition. On Thursday, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York charged Kwon with eight counts of fraud. Authorities in his native South Korea have also accused him of financial crimes.

South Korea plans to “proceed with the extradition process in accordance with the law and international agreements,” the country’s Ministry of Justice said in a statement Friday.

A year ago, Kwon was one of the richest and most powerful figures in the crypto industry. After graduating from Stanford University with a degree in computer science, he started Terraform Labs, which issued two closely linked digital currencies: TerraUSD, a stablecoin with a price of $1, and Luna, a more traditional cryptocurrency with a fluctuating value.

TerraUSD was designed to maintain its $1 value through financial engineering that connected it with Luna. The coins became wildly popular, and the value of all the Luna in circulation climbed to $40 billion as the crypto market boomed in 2021 and early 2022.

Kwon cultivated a brash persona on Twitter, dismissing critics with tweets such as “I don’t debate the poor.” His passionate followers called themselves “Lunatics.” One of his prominent venture capital backers, Mike Novogratz, even had a Luna-themed tattoo of a wolf howling at the moon.

Then Kwon’s business crashed. In May, the price of Luna dropped precipitously, bringing TerraUSD down with it. The implosion erased tens of billions of dollars of value and caused a domino effect that led to the collapse of major crypto companies, including FTX, the exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried.

Soon, Kwon was the target of criminal investigations. In September, South Korean prosecutors charged him and five others with violating the country’s financial laws. Interpol, the international police organisation, issued a “red notice” demanding his arrest. Police in Singapore also said they were investigating Kwon.

Even after Luna’s epic collapse, Kwon believed he could make a comeback in the crypto industry and unveiled a new digital coin. He told an acquaintance that he aimed to make his coin one of the 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies, without linking it to a stablecoin, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

After Bankman-Fried’s company collapsed, Kwon started posting frequently on Twitter. On December 7, he linked to a Times article that reported that the Justice Department was investigating whether Bankman-Fried had engaged in market manipulation that caused the collapse of Luna.

“What’s done in darkness will come to light,” he wrote.

In the recent call with the Times, Kwon said he had launched some open-source projects, using a term that typically refers to software built on code that is made publicly available. “I call it, like, technology philanthropy,” he said. “It doesn’t really have business models or tokens or anything of that sort.”

But the pressure on him was growing. In February, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged him with orchestrating a multibillion-dollar securities fraud. Privately, he confided that he was having a midlife crisis and that he was spending too much time thinking and not enough coding, according to the person familiar with his thinking.

Kwon arrived in Montenegro about 10 days ago, said Dritan Abazovic, the country’s prime minister. On Thursday, he went to the airport with Han, his Terraform colleague. They presented passports from Costa Rica, which immigration checks revealed were forgeries.

The Montenegrin police arrested Kwon and Han at 9 am local time and notified the Interpol bureau in Seoul, asking for confirmation that they had correctly identified them, according to the statement by South Korea’s Justice Ministry. A fingerprint match confirmed their identities.

During the arrest, Montenegrin authorities confiscated the travel documents, as well as several mobile phones.

“Montenegro is giving really big support to fight against every kind of criminal,” Abazovic said in an interview Friday. “It is our duty to try to be cooperative with other partners.”

The next step in the case is likely to involve extradition, a complex legal process that can sometimes take months to unfold. Nick Biase, a spokesperson for the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, said prosecutors in the United States were seeking Kwon’s extradition. The South Korean government said on Friday it was also planning to have Kwon extradited.

“We will see what is the first request, and after that we are ready to make the extradition to the country which is looking for him,” Abazovic said in the interview.

Whatever Kwon’s ultimate fate, the news of his arrest was greeted with celebrations in the crypto community, where he has become a deeply unpopular figure since the collapse of Luna and TerraUSD.

“I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time,” tweeted one account that has tried to mobilise victims of the Luna crash.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times

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