Turkish prosecutor requests 88k years in prison for Farm Bank creator for defrauding thousands of gamers

The court case surrounding the infamous scam game Farm Bank and its creator Mehmet Aydin (Aydın in Turkish) has taken a new turn. The rapper-turned-entrepreneur could spend the rest of his life in prison.

During a hearing in a Turkish court last month, a prosecutor asked for 88,302 years in prison for both Aydin and his brother Fatih Aydin. According to Turkish Minute, they are charged with establishing a criminal organization, “theft by deception using electronic data processing systems, banks or lending institutions,” and money laundering.

Turkey has started handing out such huge prison sentences since abolishing the death penalty in 2004. For example, Thodex CEO Faruk Fatih Ozer was sentenced to 11,196 years in prison last year, while prosecutors asked for him to be jailed for more than 40,000 years.

The crimes in Aydin’s case were committed while he and his team were running Farm Bank (Çiftlik Bank in Turkish). Developed in 2016, it was a FarmVille-style farm game where players owned virtual crops and animals. The problem was that users had to invest real money, with Aydin promising to build the biggest dairy farm in Europe for $185 million.

However, Farm Bank turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. Aydin and his team collected over $300 million (at the exchange rate at the time) from more than 130,000 people who were expecting to receive the profit promised by the entrepreneur. Most of them were left with nothing.

Turkish authorities started getting complaints from the citizens at the end of 2017. Aydin left the country, with Interpol issuing a Red Notice for his arrest in 2019. In 2021, he turned himself in to the Turkish embassy in Brazil, where he had been hiding.

In addition to Mehmet Aydin and his brother, there are dozens of other defendants in the case. The next hearing is scheduled for Novemebr 11, and the court also issued arrest warrants for 17 suspects who were not previously in custody.