Four years ago, the cryptocurrency boss disappeared. Now he has a successor.

ByTech Word News

The voicemail was desperate.

Left on Polka’s phone in 2022, it came from her older brother Sylwester Suszko, the founder of the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Eastern and Central Europe. Two weeks ago, he disappeared from a fuel depot in southwestern Poland where he kept his helicopter.

“If you don’t help me, we’ll never see each other again,” he said, begging his sister to send bitcoins to secure his release. Mr Suszek has not been heard from since and his family believe he was probably killed.

This largely forgotten mystery has now been revived. The Polish lawyer who replaced Mr. Suszko at the head of the exchange, Zondacrypto, also disappeared in April.

“One crypto boss disappearing is bad enough, but two in four years is crazy bad,” said Robert Nogacki, a lawyer in Warsaw who represents Zondacrypto customers who don’t have their accounts. “Nothing about this company makes sense.

The global cryptocurrency industry—backed by President Trump, whose family crypto business has earned about $1.4 billion—has made great strides toward mainstream adoption in recent years. However, it is still struggling to shake off the taint of numerous catastrophic failures, such as the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange in 2022, and its reputation as a magnet for fraudsters and criminals looking for ways to launder ill-gotten gains.

The Zondacrypto saga held by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk accused of ties to Russian intelligence, organized crime and right-wing politicians, helps explain why.

Zondacrypto website April went dark, leaving hundreds of thousands of clients with no way to withdraw money or trade on the exchange, an online marketplace for buying and selling digital currencies using real money or cryptocurrencies. Digital token issued by Zondacrypto, ZND, he lost more than 99.9 percent of its value.

Przemyslaw Kral, who replaced Mr. Suszko as CEO, was last heard from on April 16 when posted the video on social media imploring worried customers not to lose faith. He promised they would get their money back, thanks to what he claimed was more than $330 million worth of bitcoins held by Zondacrypto.

Getting access to that, Mr. Král conceded, could take some time. Only one person, he said, knew the digital codes needed to unlock the online treasure vault: Mr. Suszek, a former boss who went missing in 2022.

Mr. Suszek, the founder of BitBay, was the son of a miner, lauded in the Polish media as a “crypto king” with a “rags to riches” story.

Mr. Suszek split his time between a modest family home in Katowice and Warsaw, where he had a luxury apartment in a futuristic 52-story skyscraper. He flew between the two cities in a self-piloted helicopter and owned a fleet of expensive cars, including Porsches and Ferraris.

“He was very flamboyant and liked to show off his success,” recalled Karolina Wysota, a Polish journalist who interviewed him in his Warsaw apartment before he disappeared. She added that he “really believed in crypto and told me he was saving bitcoins to leave for his kids.”

In 2018, the Polish edition of Forbes declared Mr. Suszko “living proof that multimillion-dollar fortunes can be quickly built on virtual currencies.”

But that same year, Polish regulators began questioning the company’s affairs, and Mr. Suszek began looking for a new base. He tried Malta and, after failing, Estonia, promoting itself as “E-stonia”, sought a place at the forefront of the digital economy. By October 2020, he registered the company as BB Trade Estonia, joining the stampede of hundreds of other crypto businesses to the Baltic country.

The honeymoon didn’t last long.

In 2022, Estonian officials began to think about the country’s growing role as a crypto center.

A report from Estonia’s Financial Intelligence Unit, the agency then overseeing companies trading in virtual assets, from that year spoke of apparent disregard for measures to prevent money laundering. According to the agency, nearly three-quarters of companies “did not submit a single suspicious transaction report” in 2021, a worrying sign given the billion-dollar trades they’ve made and the well-known use of cryptocurrencies for money laundering and tax evasion.

Mr Suszko’s BitBay – at the time renamed Zondacrypto with BB Trade as its parent – was among the companies that never reported the suspicious transaction. She was based in a seedy business district outside the Estonian capital of Tallinn, in a small office on the second floor above a cookware store and next to a nail salon.

On a recent visit to the building, the Zondacrypto mailbox in the lobby was overflowing with months-old letters. Several nail salon employees said they never saw anyone go into the office, nominally the nerve center of the firm, which claimed to have 1.3 million clients, mostly from Poland, and assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Around the time the exchange was moving its registration to Estonia, Mr. Suszek’s sister, Nicole Suszek, began to notice a change in her brother.

Usually bubbly and eager to look on the bright side, he grew increasingly anxious and fearful for his safety, she said in an interview in Katowice. As a trigger, it seemed that an unknown person smashed the windshield of his blue Ferrari with an ax in Katowice and then left the ax embedded in the side of the car.

Ms Suszek said her brother blamed the attack on an early partner in the crypto business who was also the godfather of one of his two children – and who he believed was involved with Katowice criminals.

After the ax episode, he and his family moved to Zurich for a while. But his wife was unhappy there and they soon returned to Poland.

Then in March 2022 he disappeared.

He used two cell phones; their last signal was from a fuel depot and gas station in Czeladz, a small town near Katowice. Police investigators later discovered that he had driven there in his Porsche Taycan to a meeting with close friend and business partner Marian Wszolk, known as “Maniek”, who ran a fuel depot.

Polish prosecutors last year charged Mr Wszolk with membership of an organized crime group, large-scale value-added tax fraud and money laundering. He was also charged with “unlawful deprivation of liberty” in relation to Mr Suszko’s disappearance.

After the accusations were made, Mr. Wszolek also disappeared.

One of the last messages allegedly sent by Mr Suszek in 2022, an email to his sister, read: “They are treating me worse and worse. Now they are threatening to cut off my fingers.” It added that they “only want to get back what I owe them”.

A separate message, apparently sent by the kidnappers, said Mr Suszek was “crying like a little girl”. Another warned his family would “live a life of fear” if he didn’t pay up. “The clock is ticking,” the message warned.

Frustrated by what she saw as a sloppy police investigation into her brother’s disappearance, Mrs. Suszek hired a Polish psychic to try to find him, or at least his body. The clairvoyant told her that he had been thrown into the shaft of a disused coal mine a few miles from the fuel depot. No body was found.

Soon after Mr. Suszek disappeared, Mr. Král, his lawyer and trusted representative who lived in Monaco, took control of the business. He began spending on marketing, despite questions from auditors in Estonia whether the exchange actually had the assets its parent company reported in financial statements filed in 2023 and 2024.

Zondacrypto unabashedly sponsored major football clubs in Poland, Italy and Estonia, the Polish Olympic Committee and various foundations linked to Polish politicians, especially nationalists and libertarians.

Through a right-wing Polish television station, it also partially funded last year’s meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Poland, an American organization close to Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement.

When Polish clients began publicly complaining about payment delays in December, Mr. Král put on a brave face.

In January, he appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the stock exchange sponsored a local hockey team, and boasted that cryptocurrencies were becoming “more and more mainstream.”

In the spring, as customer complaints mounted, Mr. Král said the delay in payments was due to an upgrade to the exchange’s website. He assured the clients that they would receive the money within a few days. But the deadline kept moving, and Mr. Král began to threaten journalists if they questioned his story.

Szymon Jadczak, an investigative reporter from Wirtualna Polska, a respected online news channel that has been digging into Zondacrypto’s problems, said he was unnerved when he received a message from Mr Kral that mentioned the journalist’s private medical history, including a brain hematoma. “He told me to be careful,” Mr. Jadczak recalled in an interview in Warsaw.

By April, client concerns had escalated into full-blown panic as the exchange froze all withdrawals.

Desperate to stop the rush to the exit, Mr. King told the clients not to worry. He said that Zondacrypto had 4,500 bitcoins in reserve but needed time to get to them because only Mr. Suszek, his missing predecessor, had the digital key.

His story immediately struck a chord with cryptocurrency experts, as the locked “wallet” identified by Mr Kral as containing the company’s bitcoins had been inactive for nearly a decade.

On June 29, two months after Zondacrypto’s website was shut down, the Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit revoked the license of its parent company.

Zondacrypto has been the subject of speculation in both Poland’s parliament and its news media as to whether it was a legitimate company simply turned upside down by bad crypto bets, or a criminal enterprise set up to launder money. Bitcoin has lost half of its value since October. The prosecutor’s office in Katowice was opened an investigation into the “circumstances surrounding the establishment and operation” of Zondacrypto.

Perhaps the only one who could provide answers is Mr. King, who has not been seen for four months.

There have been several unconfirmed sightings of it in Israel, Botswana and Dubai. Mr. Nogacki, a lawyer representing exchange clients, thinks Mr. Král is probably in Southeast Asia. But he says he’s sure of only one thing about Zondacrypto: “It was a scam from day one.”

Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting.