Crypto Executive Do Kwon Pleads Not Guilty Following Arrest

Do Kwon – the disgraced crypto executive behind the Luna token and Terra USD – has pleaded not guilty to fraud and other crimes after he was arrested in the European nation of Montenegro last month while holding three phony passports.

Do Kwon: I Haven’t Done Anything!

Kwon was a fugitive for some time after his company completely collapsed and (figuratively) burnt to the ground. Organizations such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged him with fraud, and it wasn’t long before his own country of South Korea issued a warrant for his arrest.

Kwon remained active on social media for a while after the warrant was issued. He said he was not on the run, and that he was willing to cooperate with police authorities in any way possible. He also said he wasn’t going anywhere, and that he was busily coding in his living room, thus practically inviting police to come knock on his door and question him in his company’s failings.

However, the social media activity didn’t last forever, and it wasn’t long before Kwon shut his accounts down and proceeded to make his way across the globe allegedly to hide himself from those who would see him behind bars. His plight didn’t last long, however, as it was in the nation of Montenegro (where he possessed multiple fake passports) that he was finally caught.

At the time of his detainment, authorities in that nation put out the following statement:

Montenegrin police have detained a person suspected of being one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, South Korean citizen Do Kwon, co-founder and CEO of Singapore-based Terraform Labs. The former ‘cryptocurrency king’, who is behind losses of more than 40 billion dollars, was detained at the Podgorica airport with falsified documents, and South Korea, the USA, and Singapore are demanding [his extradition].

Terra USD – prior to the fall of FTX, a popular digital currency exchange – was arguably the biggest shock to the crypto world. As an algorithmic stable currency, the token had no real collateral backing it up, and it was only people’s belief in the currency that kept it on sturdy legs.

A Rug Pull?

Sadly, this belief seemed to die off quickly as it wasn’t long before the token lost its peg and fell to zero, thus causing investors to lose billions of dollars overnight. While there were a few attempts to revive the token, all proved fruitless, and the token became the latest embarrassment of the industry.

However, after this occurred, evidence emerged suggesting that Kwon and his fellow executives had tried to take their Terra reserves and convert them to BTC just weeks prior to the collapse, suggesting they knew the event was coming and that a “rug pull” was potentially being initiated.

Tags: Do Kwon, Montenegro, Terra USD