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. Susczek 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.
Zondacrypto’s website went dark in April, leaving hundreds of thousands of clients with no way to withdraw money or make trades on the exchange, an online marketplace for buying and selling digital currencies using real money or crypto. A digital token issued by Zondacrypto, the ZND, has lost more than 99.9 percent of its value.
Przemyslaw Kral, who replaced Mr. Suszek as chief executive, was last heard from on April 16, when he released a video on social media pleading with worried customers not to lose faith. He promised they would get their money back, thanks to what he claimed were Zondacrypto’s holdings of Bitcoins worth more than $330 million.
Getting access to that, Mr. Kral conceded, might take time. Only one person, he said, knew the digital codes needed to unlock the online vault holding the treasure: Mr. Suszek, the former boss who went missing in 2022.
Mr. Suszek, BitBay’s founder, was the son of a miner, lavished with praise in the Polish media as a “crypto king” with a rags-to-riches story.
Mr. Suszek divided his time between a modest family home in Katowice and Warsaw, where he had a luxury apartment in a futuristic skyscraper with 52 floors. He flew between the two cities in a helicopter he piloted himself, and he owned a fleet of expensive cars, including Porsches and a Ferrari.
“He was very flashy and liked showing off his success,” recalled Karolina Wysota, a Polish journalist who interviewed him at his Warsaw apartment before he disappeared. She added that “he really believed in crypto and told me he was saving Bitcoins to leave for his children.”
In 2018, the Polish edition of Forbes declared Mr. Suszek to be “living proof that a multimillion-dollar fortune can be built quickly on virtual currencies.”
But that same year, Polish regulators began questioning the company’s affairs, and Mr. Suszek started looking for a new base. He tried Malta and, after that failed, Estonia, which was promoting itself as “E-stonia,” seeking a place in the vanguard of the digital economy. By October 2020, he had registered the company as BB Trade Estonia, joining a stampede by hundreds of other crypto ventures to the Baltic country.
The honeymoon did not last long.
Open for Business (Next to a Nail Salon)
In 2022, Estonian officials started having second thoughts about the country’s growing role as a crypto hub.
A report that year by the Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit, the agency that then supervised companies dealing in virtual assets, told of flagrant disregard for measures meant to prevent money laundering. According to the agency, nearly three-quarters of the companies “did not send a single report about suspicious transactions” in 2021 — a worrying sign, given the billions’ worth of trades that they handled and the well-known use of crypto to launder money and evade taxes.
Mr. Suszek’s BitBay — by this time rebranded as Zondacrypto, with BB Trade as its parent — was among the companies that never reported a suspicious transaction. It was based in a shabby business district outside Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, in a small second-floor office above a kitchenware store and next to a nail salon.
On a recent visit to the building, Zondacrypto’s mailbox in the lobby was overflowing with letters dating back months. Several employees of the nail salon said they had never seen anyone go into the office, nominally the nerve center of a business that claimed to have 1.3 million clients, mostly from Poland, and hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.
Around the time the exchange was shifting its registration to Estonia, Mr. Suszek’s sister, Nicole Suszek, started noticing a change in her brother.
Usually ebullient and eager to look on the bright side, he grew increasingly anxious and fearful for his safety, she said in an interview in Katowice. The trigger seemed to be when an unidentified person smashed the windshield of his blue Ferrari in Katowice with an ax, then left the ax embedded in the side of the car.
Ms. Suszek said her brother blamed the attack on an early partner in the crypto business who was also the godfather to one of his two children — and who, he believed, was entangled with Katowice criminals.
After the ax episode, 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 vanished.
He had used two mobile phones; their last signal was from a fuel depot and gas station in Czeladz, a small town near Katowice. Police investigators later discovered he had driven there in his Porsche Taycan for a meeting with a close friend and business associate, Marian Wszolek, known as “Maniek,” who ran the fuel depot.
Polish prosecutors last year charged Mr. Wszolek with membership in an organized crime group, large-scale value-added-tax fraud and money laundering. He was also charged with “unlawful deprivation of liberty” in connection with Mr. Suszek’s disappearance.
After the charges were filed, Mr. Wszolek also vanished.
One of the last messages purportedly sent by Mr. Suszek in 2022, an email to his sister, read: “They are treating me worse and worse. They are now threatening to cut off my fingers.” It added that “they only want to get back what I owe them.”
A separate message, apparently sent by the abductors, said Mr. Suszek was “crying like a little girl.” Another warned that his family would “live a life of fear” if they didn’t pay up. “The clock is ticking,” that message warned.
Ms. Suszek, frustrated by what she saw as a lackadaisical police investigation into her brother’s disappearance, hired a Polish clairvoyant to try to find him, or at least his body. The clairvoyant told her he had been dumped in the shaft of a disused coal mine a few miles from the fuel depot. No body has been found.
Clients Panic
Soon after Mr. Suszek vanished, Mr. Kral, his lawyer and trusted deputy, who lived in Monaco, took control of the business. He began to splurge on marketing, despite questions from auditors in Estonia about whether the exchange really had the assets that its parent company said it did, in financial statements filed in 2023 and 2024.
Unfazed, Zondacrypto sponsored major soccer clubs in Poland, Italy and Estonia, the Polish Olympic Committee and various foundations tied to Polish politicians, particularly nationalists and libertarians.
Through a right-wing Polish TV station, it also partly financed a gathering last year in Poland of the Conservative Political Action Conference, an American organization close to Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement.
When Polish clients started complaining publicly in December about delays in payment, Mr. Kral put on a brave face.
In January, he appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the exchange sponsored the local ice hockey team, and boasted that crypto was becoming “more and more mainstream.”
In the spring, as customer complaints grew more insistent, Mr. Kral said payment delays were due to an upgrade of the exchange’s website. He assured clients that they would get their money within a few days. But the deadline kept slipping back, and Mr. Kral began threatening journalists if they questioned his story.
Szymon Jadczak, an investigative reporter with Wirtualna Polska, a respected online news outlet, who was digging into Zondacrypto’s troubles, said he was unnerved to get a message from Mr. Kral that mentioned the journalist’s private medical history, including a brain hematoma. “He told me to be careful,” Mr. Jadzak recalled in an interview in Warsaw.
By April, client concerns had grown into full-blown panic as the exchange froze all withdrawals.
Desperate to halt the rush for the exit, Mr. Kral told clients not to worry. He said Zondacrypto had 4,500 Bitcoins in reserve but needed time to access them, since only Mr. Suszek, his missing predecessor, had their digital key.
His story immediately struck crypto experts as fishy because the locked “wallet” that Mr. Kral identified as containing the company’s Bitcoins had been inactive for nearly a decade.
On June 29, two months after Zondacrypto’s website shut down, the Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit revoked the license of its parent company.
Zondacrypto has been the subject of speculation in both Poland’s Parliament and its news media over whether it was a legitimate company simply upended by bad bets on crypto, or a criminal enterprise that had been set up to launder money. Bitcoin has lost half its value since October. Prosecutors in Katowice have opened an investigation into the “circumstances surrounding the establishment and operation” of Zondacrypto.
Perhaps the one person who could provide answers is Mr. Kral, who has not been seen in four months.
There have been several unconfirmed sightings of him, in Israel, Botswana and Dubai. Mr. Nogacki, the lawyer representing the exchanges’s clients, thinks Mr. Kral is probably in Southeast Asia. But he says he is sure of only one thing about Zondacrypto: “It was a fraud from the first day.”
Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting.
