Four years ago, a cryptocurrency mogul disappeared; now his successor has vanished

The voice message was desperate. Left on the phone of a Polish woman in 2022, it had been sent by her older brother, Sylwester Suszek, founder of the largest cryptocurrency platform in Central and Eastern Europe. He had disappeared two weeks before a fuel deposit in southwestern Poland where he kept his helicopter. "If you don’t help me, we will never see each other again," he said, pleading with his sister to send bitcoins to secure his release. Since then, nothing has been heard from Suszek, and his family believes he was likely murdered. That largely forgotten mystery has come back to life. In April, the Polish lawyer who replaced Suszek at the helm of the platform, Zondacrypto, also disappeared. "For a CEO of a crypto company to disappear is already serious enough, but for two to go missing in four years is madness," said Robert Nogacki, a Warsaw lawyer representing Zondacrypto clients who lost access to their accounts. "Nothing about this company makes sense." The global cryptocurrency industry --- backed by President Trump, whose family cryptocurrency business has generated about $1.4 billion --- has made significant strides toward widespread acceptance in recent years. But it still struggles to shake off the stigma caused by multiple catastrophic failures, such as the 2022 collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX platform, and its reputation as a magnet for scammers and criminals seeking ways to launder illegally obtained money. The story of Zondacrypto, which Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk accused of having links to Russian intelligence, organized crime, and right-wing politicians, helps explain why. Zondacrypto's website went offline in April, leaving hundreds of thousands of customers unable to withdraw money or conduct transactions on the platform, an online marketplace for buying and selling digital currencies using traditional money or cryptocurrencies. A digital token issued by Zondacrypto, the ZND, lost more than 99.9% of its value. Przemyslaw Kral, who replaced Suszek as CEO, was last heard from on April 16, when he posted a video on social media pleading with concerned customers not to lose faith. He promised they would get their money back thanks to what he claimed were Zondacrypto's bitcoin holdings of over $330 million. Kral admitted that accessing those funds could take time. Only one person, he said, knew the digital codes needed to open the online vault where that treasure was stored: Suszek, the former boss who had disappeared in 2022. "Please, give me a little more time," Kral pleaded with his customers.

From the son of a coal miner to the "king of cryptocurrencies"

Zondacrypto began operating in 2014 under the name BitBay, from Katowice, a city in Poland's coal mining region that was becoming a dynamic economic center driven by technology and business service companies. Suszek, the founder of BitBay, was the son of a miner and Polish media praised him as a "king of cryptocurrencies," with a story of rising from poverty to wealth. Suszek split his time between a modest family home in Katowice and Warsaw, where he had a luxurious apartment in a futuristic 52-story skyscraper. He traveled by helicopter between the two cities, which he piloted himself, and owned a fleet of expensive cars, including Porsches and a Ferrari. "He was very ostentatious and liked to show off his success," recalled Karolina Wysota, a Polish journalist who interviewed him in his Warsaw apartment before his disappearance. She added that "he really believed in cryptocurrencies and told me he was saving bitcoins to leave to his children." In 2018, the Polish edition of Forbes declared that Suszek was "the living proof that a multi-million dollar fortune can be built quickly with virtual currencies." But that same year, Polish regulators began questioning the company's activities, and Suszek started looking for a new headquarters. He attempted to establish himself in Malta and, after that plan failed, in Estonia, which was promoting itself as "E-stonia" in its bid to be at the forefront of the digital economy. By October 2020, he had registered the company as BB Trade Estonia, joining the stampede of hundreds of crypto ventures moving to the Baltic country. The honeymoon didn't last long.

Open to the public, alongside a manicure salon

In 2022, Estonian authorities began to reconsider the country's growing role as a cryptocurrency operations hub. A report published that year by Estonia's Financial Intelligence Unit, the agency that then oversaw companies operating with virtual assets, described a blatant failure to comply with measures aimed at preventing money laundering. According to the agency, nearly three-quarters of companies "did not submit a single report on suspicious transactions" in 2021, a concerning sign given the billions of dollars in operations they handled and the known use of cryptocurrencies for money laundering and tax evasion. Suszek's BitBay ---which by then had changed its name to Zondacrypto, with BB Trade as the parent company--- was among the companies that had never reported a suspicious transaction. It was headquartered in a dilapidated business district on the outskirts of Estonia's capital, Tallinn, in a small second-floor office above a kitchenware store and next to a nail salon. During a recent visit to the building, the Zondacrypto mailbox located in the lobby was overflowing with letters dating back several months. Several employees of the nail salon said they had never seen anyone enter the office, which in theory was the nerve center of a company that claimed to have 1.3 million customers, mainly in Poland, and hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. By the time the platform was moving its registration to Estonia, Suszek's sister, Nicole Suszek, began to notice a change in her brother. Usually cheerful and willing to see the positive side of things, he became increasingly anxious and fearful for his safety, she recounted in an interview in Katowice. The trigger seemed to be when an unidentified person smashed the windshield of his blue Ferrari with an axe in Katowice and then left the axe embedded in the side of the car. Suszek said her brother attributed the attack to one of his early partners in the cryptocurrency business, who was also the godfather of one of his two children and whom he believed was linked to criminals in Katowice. After the axe incident, he moved for a time with his family to Zurich. But his wife was unhappy there, and they soon returned to Poland. Then, in March 2022, he disappeared. He had used two cell phones; the last signal from both came from a fuel depot and a gas station in Czeladz, a small town near Katowice. Later, police investigators discovered that he had arrived there in his Porsche Taycan to meet with a close friend and business partner, Marian Wszolek, known as "Maniek," who managed the fuel depot. Last year, Polish prosecutors charged Wszolek with belonging to a criminal organization, committing large-scale fraud with value-added tax, and money laundering. He was also charged with "illegal deprivation of liberty" in connection with Suszek's disappearance. After the charges were filed, Wszolek also disappeared. One of the last messages that Suszek allegedly sent in 2022, an email addressed to his sister, said: "They are treating me worse and worse. Now they threaten to cut off my fingers." He added that "they just want to get back what I owe them." In another message, apparently sent by the kidnappers, it was stated that Suszek was "crying like a baby." Another warned that his family would "live in fear" if he did not pay. "The clock is ticking," the message said. Frustrated by what she considered a negligent police investigation into her brother's disappearance, Suszek hired a Polish psychic to try to find him or at least locate his body. The psychic told her that they had a...

Thrown into the pit of an abandoned coal mine, a few kilometers from the fuel depot. The body was never found.

Customers Panic

Shortly after Suszek's disappearance, Kral, his lawyer and trusted right-hand man living in Monaco, took control of the company. He began spending large sums on marketing, despite doubts raised by auditors in Estonia about whether the platform actually had the assets its parent company claimed to have in the financial statements submitted in 2023 and 2024. Unfazed, Zondacrypto sponsored major football clubs in Poland, Italy, and Estonia, the Polish Olympic Committee, and various foundations linked to Polish politicians, particularly nationalists and libertarians. Through a right-wing Polish television channel, it also partially funded a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a U.S. organization close to Trump's MAGA movement, held last year in Poland. When Polish customers began publicly complaining about payment delays in December, Kral maintained a defiant attitude. In January, he appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the platform sponsored the local ice hockey team, boasting that cryptocurrencies were becoming "increasingly popular." In spring, as customer complaints grew more insistent, Kral said the payment delays were due to an update of the platform's website. He assured customers they would receive their money in a few days. But the deadline kept being postponed, and Kral began threatening journalists when they questioned his version of events. Szymon Jadczak, an investigative journalist from Wirtualna Polska, a respected online news outlet, who was investigating Zondacrypto's issues, said he became alarmed when he received a message from Kral mentioning information from his private medical history, including a brain hematoma. "He told me to be careful," Jadczak recalled in an interview in Warsaw. By April, customer concern had turned into widespread panic when the platform blocked all withdrawals. Desperate to stop the run of customers trying to withdraw their funds, Kral told them not to worry. He claimed that Zondacrypto had 4,500 bitcoins in reserve but needed time to access them, as only Suszek, his missing predecessor, had the digital key. His story immediately seemed suspicious to cryptocurrency experts because the "wallet" Kral identified as the one holding the company's bitcoins had been inactive for nearly a decade. On June 29, two months after Zondacrypto's website ceased functioning, Estonia's Financial Intelligence Unit revoked the license of its parent company. Zondacrypto has been the subject of speculation in both the Polish Parliament and the country's media about whether it was a legitimate company simply devastated by bad bets in the crypto market or a criminal organization created to launder money. Bitcoin has lost half its value since October. Prosecutors in Katowice have launched an investigation into the "circumstances surrounding the creation and operation" of Zondacrypto. Perhaps the only person who could provide answers is Kral, who has not been seen for four months. There have been several unconfirmed sightings of him in Israel, Botswana, and Dubai. Nogacki, the lawyer representing the platform's customers, believes Kral is likely in Southeast Asia. But he is convinced of one thing about Zondacrypto: "It was a scam from day one."