Terra tokens, namely Terra (LUNA) and Terra Classic (LUNC), plummeted after reports of Do Kwon’s arrest in Montenegro surfaced online on Thursday.
The price of LUNA sank to $1.27, showing an 8% loss over the past 24 hours with the 24-hour low and high of $1.275 and $1.432, respectively.
The price of LUNC also saw a significant drop of 4% over the past 24 hours and was trading down at $0.000123 with the 24-hour low and high prices of $0.0001212 and $0.0001287.
Kwon, the crypto executive who co-founded Terraform Labs, the company behind the so-called algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) and the token LUNA, is wanted in South Korea and the United States for fraud and other charges related to the $40 billion cryptocurrency crash that happened in May 2022. He was arrested in Montenegro, Southern Europe, on Thursday.
Interpol also confirmed that the man arrested in Montenegro is the crypto fugitive Kwon Do-hyeong, more popularly known in the crypto space as Do Kwon. The crypto mogul’s identity was confirmed through a fingerprint match, Interpol’s national central bureau in Seoul said.
A few hours before Interpol’s confirmation, Montenegrin Internal Affairs Minister Filip Adžić shared on Twitter that authorities in his country have arrested a man believed to be Kwon in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro.
“ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST WANTED FUGITIVES ARRESTED IN PODGORICA Montenegrin police detained a person suspected of being one of the most wanted fugitives, South Korean citizen Do Kwon, co-founder and CEO of Singapore-based Terraform Labs,” Adžić tweeted, roughly translated by Google Translate.
“The former ‘cryptocurrency king,’ who is behind losses of more than 40 billion dollars, was detained at the Podgorica airport with falsified documents, and South Korea, the USA and Singapore are demanding the same. We are waiting for official confirmation of identity,” the Montenegrin minister added.
U PODGORICI UHAPŠEN JEDAN OD NAJTRAŽENIJIH SVJETSKIH BJEGUNACA
Crnogrska policija lišila je slobode lice za koje se sumnja da je jedan od najtraženijih bjegunaca, južnokorejski državljanin Do Kwon, suosnivač i izvršni direktor Terraform Labs sa sjedištem u Singapuru.
1/2— Filip Adzic (@filip_adzic) March 23, 2023
South Korean authorities confirmed last month that Kwon was in the Balkans and received reports that he was able to cash out some Bitcoins from one of the ATMs in Belgrade in December.
While South Korean authorities exhausted all possible efforts to work with authorities abroad to catch Kwon, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), filed a lawsuit against Kwon and Terraform Labs for the $60 billion securities fraud involving Luna and the so-called algorithmic stablecoin UST.
The SEC also uncovered that Kwon and his company secretly moved more than 10,000 Bitcoin out of the company and converted some of the tokens into cash through a Swiss bank.
As of 2:17 a.m. ET on Friday, LUNA saw a 5.12% loss over the past 24 hours and was trading down $1.34 with a 24-hour volume of $98,662,752. LUNC, on the other hand, saw a 0.19% loss over the past 24 hours and was trading down $0.0001256 with a 24-hour volume of $64,925,879, according to the latest data from CoinMarketCap.
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