Terra founder Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro

According to the Minister of Interior of Montenegro, Filip Adzic, Terra founder was found in the Podgorica airport with “falsified documents.” As it happens, he was then taken into custody on the suspicion of his identity by local police.

“The Montenegrin police has apprehended an individual believed to be one of the most-wanted fugitives, a South Korean national Do Kwon, the co-founder and CEO of Terraform Labs based in Singapore,” Adzic said on his Twitter profile.

Many enforcement authorities and financial regulators, as well as the Interpol, were already on the hunt for Kwon for his alleged involvement in the collapse of terraUSD (UST) stablecoin and the Terra ecosystem.

Montenegro is geographically located south of Serbia, which emerged over the last few months as a possible location for Do Kwon, who’s wanted in his native country on charges of manipulating the capital markets. Kwon, who has been on the run since May 2022, denies any wrongdoing as he alleges that capital-markets law doesn’t apply to crypto assets.

As many authorities requested assistance from the Serbian police, reports surfaced that Kwon moved to a neighboring country as there was no official entry or exit record. Other reports suggested that he had flown to Dubai after exiting Singapore, where his crypto projects had a base.

The price of Terra’s token, once ranked among the top 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies, had been all but wiped out in the space of a few days. The meltdown has shaken confidence in other stablecoins, and the broader cryptocurrency markets miserably collapsed.

LUNA tanked to virtually zero in a couple of hours after having peaked close to $120 with a market cap of more than $18.5 billion. Additionally, its sister stablecoin TerraUSD, or UST, lost its dollar peg before the collapse.