Abdullah Bozkurt/Stockholm
A massive US class-action lawsuit has turned the spotlight on Turkey’s growing role as a safe haven for international fraudsters, exposing how the country became a staging ground for the $100 billion OmegaPro crypto Ponzi scheme.
The 137-page complaint, filed in Miami federal court in August 2024 and amended in February 2025, details how OmegaPro and its successor Go Global lured millions of investors across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas with promises of “guaranteed” 200–300 percent returns. But behind the glossy seminars and celebrity endorsements, prosecutors say, the money was never invested. Instead, it was laundered through shell firms in Dubai, Malta, Panama and, crucially, Turkey.
The OmegaPro fraud was no secret to regulators. On March 17, 2022, French and Spanish financial authorities issued cease-and-desist letters and formal fraud alerts against OmegaPro, warning that the company was operating illegally and deceiving investors.
Despite these alerts and mounting complaints from European victims, Turkey did not move against OmegaPro’s operators until mid-2024, when Andreas Szakacs and Robert Velghe were finally arrested in Istanbul, possibly after mounting pressure from other countries.
The delay raises troubling questions: Why did Turkish authorities wait more than two years to act, even as other European regulators flagged the company as fraudulent? During that gap, OmegaPro continued to recruit thousands more investors, including Turkish citizens, and launder millions through Istanbul.
Amended complaint filed by the plaintiff against Omega and its operators, alleging fraud and other criminal violations:
The Dubai-based OmegaPro, branded as one of the world’s largest crypto investment platforms, is accused of defrauding nearly 3 million investors worldwide across countries including Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile, Hong Kong, Singapore, the UK, France, Belgium, Nigeria, Congo, India and South Korea.
In Turkey the scandal exploded in the summer of 2024, when Istanbul’s gendarmerie and prosecutors began investigating local complaints. Authorities determined that OmegaPro was not registered with the Capital Markets Board (SPK) or any licensed crypto exchange platform.
Prison record showing that Andreas Szakacs was jailed at Maltepe Prison in Istanbul under the Turkish name Emre Avcı:
The first major breakthrough came on July 9, 2024, when gendarmerie raided villas in Istanbul’s wealthy Acarkent compound in Beykoz and arrested Andreas Attila Szakacs, the Swedish-Turkish co-founder of OmegaPro. Having acquired Turkish citizenship under the name “Emre Avcı,” Szakacs had been living in a four-story luxury villa equipped with security cameras, whiteboards filled with crypto notes and computers used to manage the company’s servers.
Investigators seized 32 cold wallets, password devices and corporate files documenting hundreds of millions of dollars in transfers. A preliminary review showed that Szakacs was linked to $160 million in crypto flows in just one month. He denied the fraud allegations, claiming OmegaPro collapsed in 2022 due to “bankruptcy” and that he himself was the “biggest loser.”
The net widened on September 3, 2024, when Turkish gendarmes captured Robert Velghe, OmegaPro’s Dutch managing director, in Istanbul. Velghe had flown into Turkey on August 26, 2024, reportedly to find ways to help Szakacs. To avoid detection, he checked into three separate hotels in Levent and Maslak.
On August 29 he even visited Szakacs in Maltepe Prison with a lawyer — a move that put him on investigators’ radar. When arrested, Velghe had attempted to wipe his phone clean, but authorities recovered evidence linking him to OmegaPro’s leadership well beyond 2019, despite his claim that he had left the company.
He was still appearing in video conferences and online promotions with Szakacs and other founders, recruiting investors and advertising the Ponzi scheme. Velghe, accused of personally overseeing at least $4 billion in fraudulent transfers, was jailed in Istanbul.
No movement has been observed in their cases until now, and Turkish authorities have not issued any public comment on their cases.
OmegaPro’s business model was a textbook Ponzi scheme dressed up as a crypto trading platform. Investment packages ranged from $100 to $50,000, allegedly run by an algorithm that guaranteed high returns. Investors were told they could multiply funds tenfold with leveraged trades and earn up to 300 percent profit within 16 months.
Recruits who brought in new investors received bonuses, luxury gifts and higher returns. Victims were allowed to withdraw early profits on small investments, building trust, before being persuaded to deposit larger sums, only to see accounts frozen or balances erased. The system collapsed in 2022, when payments stopped. By 2023, OmegaPro had shut down, leaving 3 million victims worldwide and an estimated $100 billion hole.
Turkey itself became a theater of fraud. Local victims who downloaded the Omega Invest mobile app, a spin-off platform linked to OmegaPro, described nearly identical stories. They first deposited small amounts, withdrew triple their investment, and were convinced the system worked.
After depositing larger sums — often $10,000 or more — their balances in the app soared to $40,000 but could never be withdrawn. So-called Investment experts pressured them to send more money to companies like Omega Teknoloji ve Danışmanlık, only for all balances to be wiped. Through the Turkish consumer complaint site “Şikayet Var,” the gendarmerie identified 16 Turkish victims in Istanbul who testified to the same pattern.
The Turkish case took on another twist when Dutch-Afghan doctor Abdul Ghaffar Mohaghegh surfaced as a complainant. He claimed to represent 3,000 victims with $103 million in losses, but Dutch investors insist he was himself a partner in the scam.
They allege Mohaghegh organized Bosporus boat tours in Istanbul to lure Dutch investors and suspect he was the one who tipped off authorities about Szakacs’s villa. His convenient presence in Turkey at the time of the arrests, combined with speculation about state ties, has fueled suspicions that the whistleblowing was part of an internal feud among the fraudsters.
The OmegaPro saga highlights why international fraudsters increasingly gravitate toward Turkey. Loopholes in citizenship-by-investment schemes, deliberately created by the corrupt government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, allowed Szakacs to assume a new Turkish identity. Turkey’s booming but weakly regulated crypto sector provided fertile ground for laundering.
The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), a close ally of the Erdoğan government with significant influence in the police and judiciary, has long been notorious for shielding organized crime figures from criminal crackdowns. Szakacs’s ability to operate freely for several years in Turkey, moving vast sums of money through Turkish financial institutions that should have triggered regulatory alarms, strongly suggests he enjoyed political protection.
Yet, despite fraud alerts issued by European regulators as early as 2022, Turkish authorities only acted in 2024, fueling suspicions of regulatory complacency or deliberate shielding. Mounting international pressure may have finally tipped the balance, making Szakacs and his close associate too costly to protect and prompting the Erdoğan government to authorize their arrests.
Whether Turkish authorities are genuinely determined to pursue this case to its full extent through indictment and trial remains to be seen. Given the judiciary’s vulnerability to corruption and political interference in Turkey, there is a real possibility that Szakacs and his associates could ultimately buy their way out of legal jeopardy.
The collapse of OmegaPro is the latest in a series of scandals tying Turkey to global financial crime. From OneCoin’s network to the collapse of the domestic Thodex exchange to Reza Zarrab’s gold-for-oil laundering, Turkey has repeatedly surfaced as a haven where fraudsters can operate, hide or negotiate protection.
Experts warn that unless Ankara strengthens financial regulation, tightens its citizenship-by-investment schemes, eliminates corruption and political interference in law enforcement and the judiciary and improves international cooperation, steps that currently appear highly unlikely, Turkey risks cementing its reputation as a global hub for financial fraud.
For the millions of OmegaPro victims, from Istanbul to Bogotá to Lagos, the Acarkent villa raids and high-profile arrests in Turkey are a stark reminder that the road to justice may still be long and that Turkey’s actions will be decisive in determining whether the stolen billions are ever recovered.
