South Korea Asks Interpol For Help In Locating Terralabs Founder Do Kwon

The founder of Terra, the cryptocurrency that collapsed earlier this year and took about $60 billion in value with it, remains missing. 

This week South Korean prosecutors have asked Interpol for help in trying to locate Do Kwon in hopes that they can arrest him, according to Bloomberg. 

“Prosecutors on Monday have made a request to Interpol for their assistance to locate Kwon, whose whereabouts remain unknown, and to have him handed over to Korea,” the agency said late on Monday this week. 

Interpol usually then asks for assistance from law enforcement globally by issuing a “red notice”, the report says, noting that it could take another week before a notice is even issued.

Kwon’s Terraform Labs was formerly based in Singapore, but Kwon has left the city-state, it says, despite claiming that he is not on the run. Seoul has said there is “circumstantial evidence of escape” since Kwon moved from South Korea back to Singapore. 

Kwon himself took to Twitter this week to defend himself, writing: “I am not ‘on the run’ or anything similar – for any government agency that has shown interest to communicate, we are in full cooperation and we don’t have anything to hide.”

He continued: “We are in the process of defending ourselves in multiple jurisdictions – we have held ourselves to an extremely high bar of integrity, and look forward to clarifying the truth over the next few months.”

But Yonhap has reported that Kwon is not cooperating with probes and has “told investigators via an attorney that he has no intention of appearing before them for questioning,” Bloomberg wrote.

Recall we wrote back in May of this year that Kwon was behind another stablecoin that failed before Terra. 

It was called “Basis Cash”, and it launched on ethereum in 2020. 

Basis Cash (BAC) also “sought to maintain a $1 peg through code, not collateral,” CoinDesk, who broke the story, wrote. BAC ultimately failed, the report notes, never getting to dollar parity and eventually crashing to “well below 1 cent” where it trades now. 

A separate op-ed on CoinDesk earlier this year called Do Kwon the “Elizabeth Holmes of crypto”.