The second act of the 1 billion crypto heist: How did teacher İsmail lose 45 thousand dollars?

Ersin Eroğlu- 12punto EXCLUSIVE

127 people, including Aşkım Kapışmak, were detained as part of an operation targeting a network determined to have carried out a 1 billion dollar heist with promises of high returns across 21 provinces, centered in Ankara.

12punto had announced that the company, which entered the market in January 2021 with a cryptocurrency called 'Smart trade coin', collapsed about 5 months later, and that the company's headquarters were established in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, an island nation in the Caribbean.

You can read about the 1 billion crypto heist in our article titled “Behind the scenes of the crypto heist: The operation was carried out three years later”.

Following our report, teacher İsmail Çimen reached out and explained the crypto victimization process to 12punto step by step.

'THE PRESENTATION WAS MADE BY FORMER REFEREE BÜLENT DEMİRLEK'

Stating that he became aware of the cryptocurrency software in question on February 14, 2021, İsmail Çimen continued his words as follows:

“To learn what the software was like, I attended a business presentation via the Zoom program by the Turkey representatives of Oceans Enterprise Smart Trade Coin Go. The person making the presentation was Bülent Demirlek, one of the former FIFA referees well-known in Turkey. In the presentation, he explained that with the software developed by Smart Trade Coin Go, there was no possibility of loss, that the company controlled our investments by giving orders to robots called bots to perform buying and selling transactions to generate profit, that they gave us 15 to 30 percent of this profit daily, and that the company took the rest. I heard that Sinan Dündoğan said he met with İlhan Özcan, Çiğdem Karaca, and Cüneyt Çiçek at the Çırağan Palace and made his decision after that.”

Correspondence in the Smart Trade Coin Go WhatsApp group

'BOT ACCOUNTS WILL WORK, YOU HAVE NO POSSIBILITY OF LOSS'

Stating that he sent Bitcoin and Ethereum cryptocurrencies from cryptocurrency exchanges in Turkey to the software on a TL basis, İsmail Çimen summarized the subsequent process as follows:

“I attended Çiğdem Karaca's Zoom meeting. In the meeting, Karaca said that the software converted the sent amount into dollars, that profit was also made from the monthly exchange rate increase, that in addition to the buying and selling trade the software did during the month, profit was also made when these cryptocurrencies increased in value, and that when starting the monthly investment, while defining the coins in the account to the bots from the marketing part, they defined 10 dollars as 9 dollars, and that for every 10 dollars, they activated a maximum of 1 dollar more, which also generated profit. She explained that to prevent losses in investments made by traders, they used what is called a stop-loss, which automatically gives a sell order if the price drops to a certain amount, thus selling with a very small loss, so there was no high loss. I bought the gold package of the software for 1000 dollars. The feature of these packages is that the silver package gives 40 bots and operates up to 2000 dollars. The gold package has unlimited bots and an unlimited investment amount. And I had a total of 11 Ethereum and 0.10 Bitcoin that I sent into it. When the leaders, who said there would be a gala at the Regnum Carya hotel, promised us along with Cüneyt Çiçek and Çiğdem Karaca at the hotel that we would transfer our money to DeFi bots and earn much more, I broke my normal bots and invested in DeFi. The next hotel meeting was in Cappadocia, and I attended that too with my teacher Hasan. The leaders dazzled us with the extremely luxurious cars they had bought for themselves and refreshed all of our trust in the software. We also got caught up in greed and tied all our savings to the software.”

Scammers sold dreams of getting rich in a short time in the Smart Trade Coin Go WhatsApp group

MONEY WAS WITHDRAWN ON JUNE 5

Stating that his money was withdrawn about four months after entering the system, İsmail Çimen said, “On June 5, 2021, around 03:00 at night, 45,297 dollars were withdrawn from my account, showing a 95 percent loss. When we asked the leader named Salim Hancı, who was the company's Ankara manager, about this, he said, 'there is a system error, it will be fixed in 48 hours.' 48 hours later, the person named Çiğdem Karaca, one of the committee leaders and Turkey managers, held a meeting on the Zoom program where she insulted Turks. She said that the investment made by the company had lost nearly 95 percent, that the company had assumed this loss, and she closed the meeting without letting anyone speak. In the statements made by the company, it was declared that the remaining 5 percent in the accounts could be withdrawn on November 30. However, we still cannot even get our money that is inside,” he said.