Terra's Do Kwon sentenced to 4 months in a Balkan prison for document forgery

Kwon was apprehended in March trying to use a fake Costa Rican passport to travel from Montenegro’s capital, Podgorica, to Dubai with the former CFO of Terraform Labs, Han Chang-joon, who also received a four-month sentence. Both men, authorities said, also had in their possession fake passports for Belgium, which were confiscated along with the Costa Rican documents and two identity cards following the verdict.

Over the weekend, Kwon denied having forged documents. According to the South Korean news agency Segye Ilbo, the 32-year-old said in court he received the Costa Rican passport from an agency in Singapore with a Chinese name that was recommended to him by a friend. He added that the Belgian passport came from another agency.

“I traveled all over the world with a Costa Rican passport,” he said in court, according to Segye Ilbo.

He also tried to cover for his colleague, saying he should be the only one punished if it came to that.

Both men will be held in Montenegrin prison for four months. The pair have been in custody since their arrest in March despite ambivalent rulings on their request for bail.

Kwon had already been sentenced to six months in custody detention as Montenegro considered extradition requests from both South Korea and the U.S. He faces criminal charges in both countries related to the collapse last year of algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) and Luna. The bank run that destroyed both coins cost crypto investors tens of billions of dollars.