A Twitter account in the name of Filip Adzic — the country's interior minister — said that police have detained a man suspected of being one of the world's most-wanted fugitives.
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Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon has been arrested in Montenegro, according to reports.
A Twitter account in the name of Filip Adzic — the country's interior minister — said that police have detained a man suspected of being one of the world's most-wanted fugitives.
The statement added that he was apprehended at a local airport, where he had falsified documents.
However, official confirmation of his identity is yet to take place.
Adzic's tweet has been retweeted by the country's prime minister.
Kwon is currently facing investigations in the U.S. and his native South Korea following the collapse of LUNA and UST last May, which wiped tens of billions of dollars from the market.
His whereabouts were unknown for many months, with Kwon previously denying that he was on the run — and his location was secret over fears for his safety.
Interpol had released a red notice for Kwon, meaning that law enforcement agencies around the world were requested to locate and arrest him ahead of an extradition.
But the fallen crypto entrepreneur had questioned whether such a red notice existed, because it wasn't on Interpol's website.
South Korea had started the ball rolling last year by issuing a warrant for his arrest and revoking his passport — making international travel challenging.
Kwon had appeared to taunt law enforcement agencies by boasting that he was going to shopping malls, on walks, and meeting people in public spaces where some of his followers would see him.
Late last year, South Korean officials had received intelligence that he was in Serbia — and indeed, Montenegro is a neighboring country.
Last month, the SEC accused Kwon and Terraform Labs of "orchestrating a multibillion-dollar cryptoasset securities fraud involving an algorithmic stablecoin and other cryptoasset securities."
UST, an algorithmic stablecoin, collapsed in the space of a week after its arbitrage-based method of maintaining its dollar peg using the free-floating LUNA token failed. Both ran nearly to zero.
At its peak, UST was the third-largest stablecoin in the market.
Beyond that, the agency is also seeking to hold Terraform Labs and Kwon "accountable for their roles in Terra's collapse, which devastated both retail and institutional investors and sent shockwaves through the crypto markets."
At the time, the SEC's director of enforcement Gurbir Grewal had said:
"The Terraform ecosystem was neither decentralized, nor finance. It was simply a fraud propped up by a so-called algorithmic 'stablecoin' — the price of which was controlled by the defendants, not any code."
There is currently no information on whether an extradition will take place — or indeed, to where.
Montenegro has been known to extradite suspects to the U.S. before, but South Korea may take precedence.
