Zondacrypto’s former chief executive vanished in 2022. Four years later, the lawyer who took over the exchange has also disappeared, leaving behind a disputed claim over 4,500 BTC said to be worth more than $330 million.
According to the report, the private key for that Bitcoin stash was known only to Sylwester Suszek, the founder of the Polish exchange once known as BitBay. With Suszek gone and his successor Przemyslaw Kral no longer in public view, the case now sits at the intersection of a missing-person investigation, a licensing crackdown, and a growing customer asset dispute.
A voice message became one of the last traces
In 2022, a Polish woman received a voice message from her brother. She heard fear in his voice and a plea: 「If you don’t help me, we will never see each other again.」
He asked his sister to send Bitcoin in exchange for his release. No one heard from him again after that. His family believes he was likely killed. The man on the recording was Suszek, founder of what had been one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in Central and Eastern Europe.
From a miner’s son to a crypto celebrity
Suszek’s rise began in 2014, when the exchange operated under the name BitBay and was based in Katowice, a Polish coal city that was shifting toward technology and business services.
Suszek, the son of a miner, was portrayed by Polish media as a self-made crypto star. The report says he moved between a modest family home in Katowice and a luxury apartment in a 52-story tower in Warsaw. He drove Porsche and Ferrari cars and even piloted a helicopter between the two cities.
Polish journalist Karolina Wysota, who interviewed him, recalled that he was 「very flashy and liked to show off his success.」 She said he told her he was storing Bitcoin for his children. In 2018, the Polish edition of Forbes described him as 「living proof」 that virtual currencies could generate a fortune quickly. That same year, Polish regulators began asking questions about the exchange’s finances, and Suszek started looking for a new jurisdiction.
Malta failed, Estonia followed, and fears grew
He first tried Malta, then moved toward Estonia, a country promoting itself as e-Estonia and pushing hard to become a digital-economy hub. In October 2020, the company registered as BB Trade Estonia, joining a larger wave of crypto firms entering the country.
By then, his family had started noticing changes. Nicole Suszek told New York Times reporter Andrew Higgins that her brother, once upbeat and optimistic, had grown anxious, suspicious, and worried about his safety.
She described a turning point: someone smashed the windshield of his blue Ferrari with an ax and left the ax embedded in the car. Nicole said her brother blamed an early business partner who was also the godfather of one of his children. He suspected that person had ties to a criminal group in Katowice.
The last known location was a fuel depot
After the ax attack, Suszek moved his family to Zurich for a time, though they soon returned to Poland because his wife was unhappy there. In March 2022, he disappeared.
He was using two phones at the time, and the last signals from both devices pointed to a fuel storage site and gas station in Czeladz. Investigators later found that he had driven a Porsche Taycan there to meet Marian Wszolek, a close business associate and friend. The fuel depot was run by Wszolek.
Polish prosecutors last year charged Wszolek with participation in an organized crime group, large-scale VAT fraud, money laundering, and unlawful deprivation of liberty, directly linking him to Suszek’s disappearance. After the indictment was made public, Wszolek also disappeared.
Family messages described threats and fear
After Suszek vanished, his family received several messages said to have come from him. In one email to his sister, he wrote: 「They are treating me worse and worse, and now they are threatening to cut off my fingers,」 adding that 「they just want to take back what I owe.」
Another message, apparently from kidnappers, said Suszek was 「crying like a little girl.」 A separate warning said that if the family did not pay, they would 「live in fear for the rest of their lives,」 and added that 「time is passing.」
Frustrated with the pace of the police investigation, Nicole later sought help from a Polish psychic in hopes of at least finding her brother’s body. The psychic said the body had been dumped in an abandoned coal shaft a few miles from the fuel depot. No remains have been found.
Estonia’s crypto oversight tightened as questions mounted
The exchange later adopted the name Zondacrypto, while its parent company operated as BB Trade. In 2022, Estonian officials also began rethinking the country’s role as a haven for crypto businesses.
The Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit, which supervised virtual asset service providers at the time, said in a report that nearly three-quarters of supervised companies had not filed a single suspicious transaction report in 2021. Given that those firms handled transactions worth billions of dollars and that crypto had long been associated with money laundering and tax evasion risks, the figure drew scrutiny.
Zondacrypto was described as one of the companies that had never reported a suspicious transaction. Andrew Higgins of The New York Times visited the company’s listed office in Tallinn and found what the report described as a worn second-floor room above a kitchenware store, next to a nail salon. The exchange claimed 1.3 million customers and hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. Mailboxes were stuffed with unopened letters that had been sitting there for months, and workers at the nail salon said they had never seen anyone enter or leave the office.
Kral took over and spent heavily on promotion
After Suszek disappeared, trusted lawyer and deputy Przemyslaw Kral assumed control and ran the company from Monaco.
His style differed sharply from Suszek’s later caution. The report says he spent heavily on marketing even as Estonian auditors, in financial statement reviews filed in 2023 and 2024, raised questions about whether the parent company’s declared assets were real.
Kral sponsored top football clubs in Poland, Italy, and Estonia, the Polish Olympic Committee, and several foundations linked to right-wing and liberal political figures in Poland. Through a Polish right-wing television channel, he also partly funded last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Poland, an event described as closely tied to Donald Trump’s MAGA camp.
In December last year, Polish customers began complaining publicly about delayed withdrawals. Kral kept a calm public posture. In January, he appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, sponsored a local hockey team, and said crypto was becoming 「more and more mainstream.」
The 4,500 BTC reserve claim brought new doubts
By spring, customer frustration had turned into panic. Kral first blamed the withdrawal delays on a website upgrade and said payouts would resume within days, but the deadline kept moving.
On April 16, he posted a video on social media in what became his last public appearance. He urged customers not to lose faith and said Zondacrypto held Bitcoin reserves worth more than $330 million, but needed more time to access them because the digital key to the online vault was known only to one person: Suszek, the former chief executive who had disappeared four years earlier.
「Please give me a little more time,」 Kral said in the video. The explanation immediately drew skepticism. The wallet address he cited as holding the company’s 4,500 BTC had shown no movement for nearly a decade, according to the report’s description of on-chain data.
A reporter said he received a threat, then the platform shut down
As pressure from customers increased, Kral was also accused of threatening journalists who questioned the company’s finances. Szymon Jadczak of Polish investigative outlet Wirtualna Polska told The New York Times that he had received messages from Kral that referred to his private medical history, including a past brain hematoma.
「He told me to be careful,」 Jadczak said in Warsaw.
In April, Zondacrypto’s website went fully offline and withdrawals were frozen across the platform, turning fear into a run by customers. On June 29, two months after the site shut down, Estonia’s Financial Intelligence Unit revoked the virtual asset service license of parent company BB Trade Estonia.
No one has seen Kral in person in the four months since. Only unverified sightings have surfaced, pointing to Israel, Botswana, and Dubai. Robert Nogacki, a Warsaw lawyer representing many affected Zondacrypto customers, said he believed Kral was likely hiding in Southeast Asia.
Polish prosecutors merged the exchange case with the disappearance probe
Polish prosecutors estimate potential losses in the case at no less than 350 million zloty, or about 82.8 million euros. More than 30,000 customers have reported being affected. On July 30, Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office formally merged the Zondacrypto case with the Suszek disappearance investigation.
On-chain data cited in the report shows Zonda’s hot wallet balance has dropped about 99.7% since late last year, while average monthly outflows fell from around 55 BTC to 0.086 BTC. Between December 2025 and this April, the wallet also sent out about $21.2 million through 511 transactions across 30 different tokens.
The core issue is simple and brutal: if the only person said to know the key is gone, access to the funds may be gone too. Now the second figure expected to account for those assets has vanished as well.
「I can only be sure of one thing,」 Nogacki said. 「This company was a scam from day one.」