Topics: News, World News, Crime, Money
A man managed to scam people out of tens of millions of dollars using a seemingly innocuous farming game.
Mehmet Aydın aimed the app at people living in Turkey, and structured it as a mobile game.
The app was called Farm Bank, or Çiftlik Bank in Turkish, and in the game players can purchase virtual livestock as well as upgrades in order to expand their farm.
So far it sounds like a standard mobile gaming platform, where users can use in-game currency to buy things and also buy more of the in game currency using their actual money.
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These games use microtransactions which feel small but collectively add up.
But in the case of Farm Bank things went one step further as the app also had a function where people could earn gold bars that they could withdraw as currency.
It didn't stop there, either.
The app also claimed to allow users to invest their money in 'real' livestock.
YouTuber @fern-tv investigated the app in a post to their social media channel.
They said: “You can invest your money in virtual livestock, by doing that you automatically invest in real farms that actually exist and the real production of those real animals are then sold in dedicated farm shops."
The agricultural industry in Turkey had been in the middle of a series of problems at the time that the game was released.
This meant that people were attracted to the game as they felt that it might offer a way to help revive the struggling industry in the country.
But it later emerged that the whole app and game was actually just a massive scam.
In 2017 it was reported that some $250 million had been invested into the app, at which point users started to notice problems with actually withdrawing their money from the app.
Then, according to Fern, there was a big development right at the end of 2017.
Fern said: “In December 2017, [Aydın] suddenly sells his shares in the company. A months later, Çiftlik Bank says it has suspended accepting new users, it also stops paying out profits.”
A few months later in March 2018 authorities finally confirmed that the app had been a scam the whole time.
This turned into an international manhunt after Aydın fled the country.
Eventually he was caught while hiding out in São Paulo in Brazil in 2021, some three years after the scandal broke.
He was arrested and extradited back to Turkey, where he could face a rather ludicrous sentence of 89,000 years in prison.
