Roman Ż. is accused of taking PLN 7.8 million from customer accounts by altering the exchange's own records. The wider case now covers PLN 350 million and more than 3,600 complaints.
A district court in Katowice ordered Roman Ż. held in pre-trial detention late on Monday, hours after Polish prosecutors charged him with belonging to an organised criminal group and misappropriating PLN 7.8 million, roughly $2.1 million, belonging to customers of the collapsed exchange Zondacrypto.
He was detained on 5 September and is the fifth person publicly charged in the case. He pleaded not guilty and gave explanations to investigators, according to the National Prosecutor's Office, which had asked the Katowice Wschód District Court for detention on three grounds: the severity of the potential sentence, the risk that he would obstruct the investigation, and the possibility that he would flee. The offences carry up to ten years.
The allegation is not a hack. Prosecutors say the group changed, deleted and added computer records without authorisation in order to obtain a financial benefit — computer fraud, in the language of the Polish criminal code. That distinction matters more than it sounds. On a centralised exchange, customer balances are rows in a database the operator owns, not entries on a public chain. Anyone with write access can create a balance no deposit backs, or erase one a deposit did, and no amount of chain analysis will surface it, because nothing moved onchain.
The wider investigation covers reported losses of at least PLN 350 million, about $94 million. More than 3,600 people have filed crime reports, and prosecutors have said the total may climb as further reports arrive. Set against that figure, the sum Roman Ż. is personally accused of taking is a little over two per cent.
Four others were charged before him. Radosław P., identified across Polish and crypto press as Polish Olympic Committee president Radosław Piesiewicz, was charged in late August over bribes he is alleged to have accepted in return for signing a sponsorship contract with the exchange. Anna P., Jaromira W. and Rafał Z. followed after arrests on 2 September. Five sets of charges inside a fortnight is what it looks like when prosecutors stop building a theory and start executing one.
Zondacrypto began as BitBay, founded in Katowice in 2014 by Sylwester Suszek. By 2018 it was the largest exchange in Poland, with 800,000 users and around 200 staff, and it announced it would shut its Polish operations and move to Malta after the last Polish bank willing to bank crypto firms ended the relationship. The rebrand to Zondacrypto came afterwards.
Suszek disappeared in 2022 and has not been found. Przemysław Kral took over the business. In July, prosecutors folded the inquiry into the disappearance into the fraud case. The man who sat down with this site in 2020 to describe BitBay as a gateway for newcomers converting złoty, euros and pounds into crypto is now a missing person inside a criminal investigation into the company he built.
Trading stopped in April, after customers found they could not withdraw.
What that leaves them with is a criminal case, not a recovery process. Charges against five people do not by themselves return a złoty to anyone, and the method prosecutors describe, records altered rather than coins moved, is the kind that tends to leave little behind to seize. The 3,600 filings are evidence in an investigation. They are not yet claims against an estate.
There is an obvious precedent and it is not an encouraging one. QuadrigaCX also had a founder who left the scene and a ledger nobody could reconcile. Close to 17,000 users filed claims against what remained of the Canadian exchange, and the process ground on for years to return a fraction of what was owed. Zondacrypto's claimant count is smaller so far. Its criminal case is considerably further along, which is the one respect in which its customers are better placed.
Zondacrypto marketed itself as the largest regulated digital asset trading platform in Europe. That was probably true in the narrow sense a registration permits, and it tells you what such registrations are actually for. They test capital, disclosure and anti-money-laundering procedure. They do not test who inside the company can edit a row in the customer ledger at two in the morning, which is precisely the failure prosecutors are now describing. It is the failure mode that keeps recurring, and no European framework yet written asks about it directly.
Prosecutors describe the PLN 350 million figure as provisional. Reports from alleged victims are still arriving.
