Crypto Founder’s Disappearance Revisited: Successor Vanishes Amid Mystery

A desperate voice message was left on the phone of a Polish woman in 2022.

It was from her older brother, Sylwester Suszek, founder of one of Eastern and Central Europe’s largest crypto exchanges, who had vanished two weeks earlier from a fuel depot in southwestern Poland where he stored his helicopter.

“If you don’t help me, we will never see each other again,” he pleaded, urging his sister to send Bitcoin to secure his release. Mr. Suszek has not been seen since, and his family suspects he was likely murdered.

The long‑forgotten mystery has resurfaced. In April, the Polish lawyer who succeeded Mr. Suszek as head of Zondacrypto also disappeared.

“One crypto founder’s disappearance is tragic enough, but two in four years is unprecedented,” said Robert Nogacki, a Warsaw lawyer representing Zondacrypto’s stranded clients. “Nothing about this firm adds up.”

The global cryptocurrency sector — bolstered by former President Trump, whose family crypto ventures have generated roughly $1.4 billion — has advanced toward mainstream acceptance in recent years. Yet it continues to grapple with the fallout from numerous catastrophic failures, such as the 2022 collapse of Sam Bankman‑Fried’s FTX exchange, and its lingering image as a haven for fraudsters and money launderers.

The saga surrounding Zondacrypto, which Prime Minister Donald Tusk has accused of links to Russian intelligence, organized crime, and right‑wing politicians, helps explain the company’s troubles.

Zondacrypto’s website went offline in April, leaving hundreds of thousands of clients unable to withdraw funds or trade on the platform, an online marketplace for digital currencies. Its native token, ZND, has lost over 99.9 % of its value.

Przemysław Król, who succeeded Mr. Suszek as chief executive, was last heard from on April 16, when he posted a social‑media video urging anxious customers not to lose faith. He promised to return their funds, citing Zondacrypto’s alleged holding of over $330 million in Bitcoin.

Accessing those assets may take time, Mr. Król admitted. He said only one individual — Mr. Suszek, the missing founder — possessed the digital keys to unlock the vault containing the treasure.

Mr. Suszek, founder of BitBay, was the son of a miner who was celebrated in Polish media as a “crypto king” with a rags‑to‑riches narrative.

He split his time between a modest family home in Katowice and a luxury apartment in a 52‑floor skyscraper in Warsaw, where he owned a fleet of high‑end cars, including Porsches and a Ferrari, and piloted his own helicopter between the cities.

“He was extremely flamboyant and loved to display his wealth,” recalled journalist Karolina Wysota, who interviewed him in his Warsaw apartment before his disappearance. She added that he “truly believed in crypto and was setting aside Bitcoin for his children.”

In 2018, the Polish edition of Forbes highlighted Mr. Suszek as “living proof that a multimillion‑dollar fortune can be built quickly on virtual currencies.”

That same year, however, Polish regulators began scrutinizing the firm’s operations, prompting Mr. Suszek to seek a new base. After an attempt in Malta failed, he turned to Estonia, then promoting itself as “E‑stonia” as a hub for the digital economy. By October 2020 he had registered the company as BB Trade Estonia, joining a wave of crypto ventures moving to the Baltic nation.

The honeymoon was short‑lived.

Business Operations Amid a Nail Salon Setting

In 2022, Estonian officials began to question the nation’s expanding role as a crypto hub.

A report that year from Estonia’s Financial Intelligence Unit, which oversaw virtual‑asset firms, highlighted blatant disregard for anti‑money‑laundering safeguards. The agency noted that nearly three‑quarters of companies “did not file a single report on suspicious transactions” in 2021 — a concerning trend given the billions of dollars traded and the common use of crypto for money laundering and tax evasion.

Mr. Suszek’s BitBay — by then rebranded as Zondacrypto and owned by BB Trade — was among the firms that never filed a suspicious‑transaction report. It operated from a modest second‑floor office above a kitchenware shop in a rundown district on the outskirts of Tallinn, adjacent to a nail salon.

During a recent visit, Zondacrypto’s lobby mailbox was filled with letters dating back months. Employees at the neighboring nail salon said they had never observed anyone entering the office, which ostensibly served as the nerve center of a firm claiming 1.3 million clients, mostly Polish, and hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.

Around the time the exchange was relocating to Estonia, Mr. Suszek’s sister, Nicole, began noticing changes in her brother.

Typically upbeat and optimistic, he grew increasingly anxious and fearful for his safety, she said in a Katowice interview. The trigger appeared to be when an unknown individual smashed the windshield of his blue Ferrari with an ax and left the weapon embedded in the vehicle.

Ms. Suszek said her brother blamed the attack on an early business partner in the crypto sector, who was also the godfather to one of his children and, in his view, had ties to Katowice criminals.

After the incident, he temporarily relocated with his family to Zurich, but his wife was unhappy, and they soon returned to Poland.

Then, in March 2022, he disappeared.

He used two mobile phones; their final signal came from a fuel depot and gas station in Czeladz, a small town near Katowice. Investigators later discovered he had driven there in his Porsche Taycan for a meeting with a close associate, Marian Wszolek — known as “Maniek” — who operated the depot.

Polish prosecutors last year charged Mr. Wszolek with membership in an organized crime group, large‑scale VAT fraud, and money laundering. He was also charged with “unlawful deprivation of liberty” related to Mr. Suszek’s disappearance.

After the charges were filed, Mr. Wszolek also vanished.

One of the last messages allegedly 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 from the abductors, described Mr. Suszek as “crying like a little girl.” Another warned that his family would “live a life of fear” unless payments were made. “The clock is ticking,” the message warned.

Frustrated by what she viewed as a lackluster police investigation, Ms. Suszek hired a Polish clairvoyant to locate her brother or his remains. The clairvoyant claimed he had been discarded in the shaft of an abandoned coal mine a few miles from the fuel depot. No body has been found.

Client Anxiety Escalates

Soon after Mr. Suszek’s disappearance, Mr. Král, his lawyer and trusted deputy based in Monaco, assumed control of the business. He began spending heavily on marketing, even as Estonian auditors questioned whether the exchange truly possessed the assets asserted in its 2023 and 2024 financial statements.

Undeterred, Zondacrypto sponsored major soccer clubs in Poland, Italy, and Estonia, the Polish Olympic Committee, and various foundations linked to Polish politicians, especially nationalists and libertarians.

Through a right‑wing Polish television station, it also partly financed a gathering in Poland of the Conservative Political Action Conference, a U.S. organization closely aligned with Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement.

When Polish clients publicly complained in December about payment delays, Mr. Král maintained a brave front.

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 client complaints intensified, Mr. Král blamed an upgrade of the exchange’s website for payment delays, assuring clients they would receive funds within days. However, the deadline kept slipping, and he began threatening journalists who questioned his narrative.

Szymon Jadczak, an investigative reporter at the respected online outlet Wirtualna Polska, who was probing Zondacrypto’s troubles, said he was unsettled when Mr. Král sent a message referencing his private medical history, including a brain hematoma. “He told me to be careful,” Jadczak recalled in a Warsaw interview.

By April, client concerns escalated into full‑blown panic as the exchange froze all withdrawals.

Desperate to curb the exodus, Mr. Král told clients not to worry, saying Zondacrypto held 4,500 Bitcoins but needed time to access them, as only Mr. Suszek, his missing predecessor, possessed the digital keys.

His story immediately struck crypto experts as suspect, given that the “wallet” Král cited as holding the company’s Bitcoins had been inactive for nearly a decade.

On June 29, two months after Zondacrypto’s website went offline, Estonia’s Financial Intelligence Unit revoked the license of its parent company.

Zondacrypto has been the focus of speculation in Poland’s Parliament and media over whether it was a legitimate firm derailed by bad crypto bets or a criminal enterprise designed for money laundering. Bitcoin has lost half its value since October, and prosecutors in Katowice have opened an investigation into the “circumstances surrounding the establishment and operation” of Zondacrypto.

Perhaps the only person who could provide answers is Mr. Kral, who has not been seen in four months.

Several unconfirmed sightings placed him in Israel, Botswana, and Dubai. Mr. Nogacki, the lawyer representing Zondacrypto’s clients, believes Mr. Kral is likely in Southeast Asia. He says he is certain of only one thing about Zondacrypto: “It was a fraud from the first day.”

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