He Emptied An Entire Crypto Exchange Onto A USB Drive. Then He Disappeared

Faruk was born in February 1994, the youngest of three. He was inseparable from his brother, Güven, and sister, Serap. They grew up camping, playing video games, and cooking together. Friends always noted their shared sense of humor. His parents owned a print and copy shop in the city of Kocaeli, across the street from their house. They were orthodox Muslims who gave their children meaningful names: “trust” (Güven), “mirage” (Serap), and “the one who distinguishes between good and evil” (Faruk).

Kocaeli is an industrial port city about 100 kilometers east of Istanbul, surrounded by a checkerboard of tobacco and sugar beet fields, petrochemical plants and paper mills. Roman emperors once called it home, and their crumbling fortress walls still snake through the landscape. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Kocaeli became a manufacturing city, and its people pushed the newly formed Republic of Turkey into the Industrial Revolution.

When Özer was born, the Turkish economy was in a downward spiral. A fragile financial system, irresponsible lending and political corruption had caused a brief period of triple-digit inflation. The lira’s volatility threatened the savings of the entire population. So many people were shifting their domestic assets into foreign-currency deposits that by the end of the year, a whopping 50 percent of bank deposits in Turkey were in foreign currency. The year before, that figure was just 1 percent.

That same month, Özer was born, a charismatic orator with a friendly gaze and a broomstick moustache who began campaigning on the streets of Istanbul in a paisley kipper tie. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan railed against the secular elite that had nearly led the country to economic collapse. A devout Muslim, he walked the streets of his neighborhood, Kasımpaşa, a poor district where he grew up selling simit, or sesame bread, and promising reforms. In a surprise election, he rose to become mayor of Istanbul.

Around the same time, two Turkish business magnates launched Turkcell, the country’s first mobile communications system. (This was a year and a half before the same technology was released in the United States.) In 2003, Erdoğan was elected prime minister, kicking off a decade of unprecedented growth that foreign observers dubbed Turkey’s “Quiet Revolution.” In a departure from his predecessors, he governed through the lens of a businessman, ushering in a massive construction boom across the country and eventually curbing Turkey’s rampant inflation. His pro-business rhetoric boosted the middle class and set Turkey on a path toward European Union membership.

Özer also caught the entrepreneurial spirit at a young age. As a teenager in the mid-2000s, he worked in his parents’ printing house after school. “Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to start my own business, no matter what industry it was in,” he said. At the end of his sophomore year in high school, he decided that further education would not lead him to that dream, so he dropped out.

In 2013, Turkey’s gross domestic product had nearly tripled, the lira was hovering just above the dollar, and the country was in talks to join the EU. BtcTurk, Turkey’s first cryptocurrency exchange (and reportedly the world’s fourth), was gearing up for launch. In May of that year, a group of activists gathered in Istanbul’s Gezi Park to protest plans to redevelop it into a shopping mall with Ottoman-era architecture. They were opposed not only to the loss of green space, but also to the glorification of Turkey’s Islamic past in a society that called itself secular. Police brutally cracked down on the protesters, sparking a nationwide movement. Within weeks, more than 3 million people had joined the demonstrations, their frustration now centered on the growing authoritarianism of Erdoğan’s government. Thousands were injured and at least five died. Özer had just turned 19. In the years that followed, Erdoğan jailed record numbers of journalists and censored the internet, causing foreign investors to pull out.