A Polish court has approved pretrial detention for a fifth suspect in the investigation into crypto exchange Zondacrypto, Prosecutor General Waldemar Żurek said late Monday.
The suspect, identified as Roman Ż. under Poland’s convention of abbreviating suspects’ surnames, was charged earlier that day with membership in an organized criminal group and, within that group, misappropriating clients’ funds through computer fraud.
Żurek wrote on social media that the court had accepted the prosecution’s request and agreed to place Roman Ż. in temporary custody.
What prosecutors allege
Prosecutors say the group took no less than 7.8 million złoty, around $2 million, from users of the exchange. The alleged method involved unauthorized changes, deletions, and additions to the exchange’s data, as well as interference with the way the platform processed and transmitted that data. Roman Ż. faces up to 10 years in prison.
Police detained him in Silesia on Saturday and seized exchange documents. He denied the charges and gave a statement.
The Zondacrypto timeline
The exchange launched in Katowice in 2014 as BitBay and was founded by Suszek. In 2020, after shifting its registration to Estonia under parent company BB Trade Estonia, it adopted the name Zondacrypto. The company said it had 1.3 million clients, most of them in Poland.
Prosecutors allege that an organized group operated from 2020 to 2026 with the aim of taking over Suszek’s assets.
The exchange froze withdrawals and went dark in April. Przemysław Kral, the lawyer who became chief executive after Suszek disappeared in March 2022, has not been seen since April 16. Before that, he told customers that the exchange held 4,500 BTC and that only Suszek could unlock them. Estonia’s financial intelligence unit revoked BB Trade Estonia’s license on June 29.
Earlier detentions and money movement allegations
Anna P., Jaromira W., and Rafał Z. were placed in pretrial detention for three months on September 4. Prosecutors have alleged that nearly €8 million left the operator’s account last October to buy property in France, that a €2.9 million loan was recorded as repaid when it had not been, that two Katowice properties worth 700,000 złoty and 800,000 złoty were transferred without payment, and that 7.5 million złoty was laundered through fictitious property purchases.
A further count in the case involves 1.7 million złoty.
Separate allegation tied to the Suszek investigation
One of the charges concerns the investigation into Suszek himself. Prosecutors allege that Anna P. obstructed proceedings into his deprivation of liberty by removing a hard drive from a filling station’s CCTV recorder and by inciting false testimony.
All three denied the charges. The Katowice regional prosecutor’s office opened the case in April as an investigation into large-scale fraud and money laundering, and it has received several thousand complaints.
