Seoul/Atlanta (CNN) Interpol says a man arrested in Montenegro is Kwon Do-hyeong, also known as Do Kwon, the disgraced founder of a collapsed crypto company who is wanted in South Korea and the United States on fraud and other charges.
Kwon, a South Korean, founded the blockchain platform behind stablecoin TerraUSD and its sister coin Luna. Both coins lost their value within a few days in May 2022, erasing about $40 billion from the crypto market and causing panic in the speculative sector.
Kwon’s identity was confirmed by a fingerprint match, Interpol’s national central office in Seoul told CNN on Friday.
A day earlier, Montenegrin Interior Minister Filip Adžić wrote on social media that a man believed to be Kwon was arrested in the capital Podgorica.
“He was arrested at the airport with forged documents and is wanted by several countries including the US, South Korea and Singapore,” Adžić said in a Facebook post.
Based in Singapore, Kwon ran the blockchain platform Terraform Labs. Seoul prosecutors told CNN in December that the crypto entrepreneur is believed to be in Serbia, where he was hiding after leaving Singapore via Dubai.
In September, a South Korean court issued an arrest warrant for Kwon after he was accused of fraud by investors in the country after his company collapsed.
Kwon was charged with fraud and violating South Korea’s Capital Markets Law. He said in October he didn’t think the charges were legitimate, claiming they were “politically motivated”.
The crypto developer has repeated claimed on Twitter that he was not “on the run” but refused to reveal his whereabouts out of concern for his personal safety.
Terraform Labs was behind TerraUSD, a stablecoin that theoretically should retain a $1 price point.
The collapse of TerraUSD and Luna, two linked coins, triggered the so-called “crypto winter” from which the industry struggled to recover, although it suffered another major blow from crypto exchange FTX’s fall in November.
— CNN’s Jake Kwon contributed coverage