Four Years Ago, a Crypto Boss Went Missing. Now His Successor Has.

The voice message was desperate.Left on the phone of a Polish woman in 2022, it was from her older brother, Sylwester Suszek, the founder of Eastern and Central Europe’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange.He had disappeared two weeks earlier from the fuel depot in southwest Poland where he kept his helicopter.“If you don’t help me, we will 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 believes he was probably killed.That largely forgotten mystery has now surged back to life.

In April, the Polish lawyer who replaced Mr.Suszek at the helm of the exchange, Zondacrypto, also vanished.“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 locked out of their accounts.

“Nothing about this company makes any sense.”The global cryptocurrency industry — supported by President Trump, whose family crypto business has earned about $1.4 billion — has made big strides toward mainstream acceptance in recent years.But it is still struggling to shake off the taint of multiple catastrophic failures, like the 2022 collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange, and its reputation as a magnet for fraudsters and criminals looking for ways to launder ill-gotten gains.The saga of Zondacrypto, which Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, has accused of having ties to Russian intelligence, organized crime and right-wing politicians, helps explain why.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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