Founder of a Turkish online Ponzi scheme Mehmet Aydın, who had been accused of embezzling money from thousands of people, was sentenced to 45,376 years and six months in prison.
Prosecutors sought over 75,000 years in prison for him and his brother Fatih Aydın on charges including establishing and running an illegal organization, fraud and money laundering.
Aydın is accused of defrauding through once-popular Farm Bank, an online game where participants owned and traded virtual animals and crops.
Participants had to invest real cash, which Aydın claimed at the time he would use to finance Europe’s biggest dairy farm project.
Aydın was believed to have collected the equivalent of more than $131 million from over 130,000 people through the scheme.
He fled abroad with some of the money in early 2018 and was at large for more than three years before he turned himself in to authorities in Brazil and was extradited to Türkiye in mid-2021.
