Key takeaways:
- South Korean prosecutors are attempting to obtain a court order to freeze Do Kwon’s national assets, valued at $5.3 million.
- Authorities froze Daniel Shin’s assets last week, who co-founded Terraform Labs with Kwon and whose wealth is estimated to be around $116.5 million.
According to a report by Yonhap News on April 11, South Korean prosecutors are attempting to obtain a court order to freeze Do Kwon’s assets in the nation, valued at $5.3 million.
Since the Terra-LUNA collapse in May 2022, which destroyed around $40 billion in market value, Terraform Labs co-founder Kwon has been the subject of a fraud and tax evasion inquiry in South Korea.
According to the media outlet, prosecutors are also looking for possible illicit earnings that Kwon may have earned abroad and stored in various cryptocurrency exchanges and Swiss bank accounts.
Due to the fact that Do Kwon changed them to Bitcoin (BTC) and transferred them to international markets like Binance, prosecutors said last week that he had “almost no property” in South Korea. To freeze Kwon’s assets on the exchange, the prosecution contacted Binance.
Authorities froze Daniel Shin’s assets last week, who co-founded Terraform Labs with Kwon and whose wealth is estimated to be around $116.5 million. Land, structures, and vehicles were among the assets.
Authorities in South Korea assert that Kwon, Shin, and seven additional Terraform workers defrauded investors to $314.2 million. According to the prosecutors, Shin alone made nearly $115 million from the crash, while Kwon made $69 million.
Kwon had become one of the most wanted fugitives in the world since the collapse, and Interpol issued a red notice for him in September 2022. Kwon was apprehended in March in Montenegro after being on the run for 11 months.
American authorities accused Kwon of eight fraud charges, including securities, commodities, and wire fraud, hours after his detention. Kwon is imprisoned in Montenegro, and both the United States and South Korea are attempting to extradite him. In Montenegro, Kwon is also accused of traveling with forged documents.
As a result of the South Korean court rejecting the prosecutor’s plea for an arrest warrant a second time in March, Shin is still at large.
Approximately $13 million in digital assets from the hot wallet of the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange GDAC were recently lost due to a security breach. The exchange has asked that other platforms forbid users from depositing the account used to withdraw the stolen funds. A little over 23% of the exchange’s cryptocurrency assets were made up of stolen money.
