TerraUSD implosion: Interpol’s “Red Notice” against Do Kwon

Prosecutors in South Korea are calling on police authorities around the world to arrest and extradite the TerraUSD founder. Where he remains unknown.

The boss of Terraform-Labs and responsible for the imploded cryptocurrency TerraUSD is now being searched via Interpol with the highest urgency. The responsible public prosecutor’s office in South Korea has succeeded in issuing a Red Notice (“Red Notice”) for Do Kwon, reports Bloomberg, among others. This calls on police authorities around the world to locate and arrest him in order to be able to extradite him to South Korea. His name has not yet appeared in Interpol’s publicly accessible database. The tender was applied for last Tuesday, reports the Korea Times newspaper; the implementation, therefore, takes more than 10 days.

On the run, isn’t it?

Terraform-Labs was responsible for TerraUSD, the world’s fourth largest so-called stablecoin. These are cryptocurrencies that peg their price to another value – such as the US dollar. A unit of the coin must then always be worth one US dollar. Terraform-Labs tried to ensure this through a so-called algorithmic binding but did not have enough reserves. At the beginning of May, TerraUSD fell in value from around USD 0.99 to around USD 0.01. In the process, tens of billions of US dollars in market capitalization were lost, and many cryptocurrencies lost massively in value. Investigations were launched in South Korea after dozens of investors filed complaints after the crash. They accuse Do Kwon of cheating on them.

Until a few weeks ago, Do Kwon was still in Singapore and had assured that he wanted to cooperate with the investigative authorities in South Korea. However, after an arrest warrant was issued for him there, Singapore police could not locate him. Prosecutors in South Korea then said he was “obviously on the run” and didn’t seem to want to cooperate. Does Kwon contradict this on Twitter? He’s not on the run. However, he did not write where he was staying. According to the Korea Times, South Korea’s foreign ministry is already considering invalidating his passport, which would give the businessman 14 days to return to the country.