Roman Ż. becomes the fifth suspect
Roman Ż. was arrested on Saturday, September 5, before being questioned at length by prosecutors in Katowice. The development came just days after the arrest of the president of the Polish Olympic Committee, already documented by Bref Crypto, in the same investigation.
According to Anna Adamiak, spokesperson for Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office, the first charge against Roman Ż. concerns his alleged participation in an organized criminal group that sought to commit computer fraud against users of the platform. The alleged damage in this part of the case amounts to at least 7.8 million zlotys, or approximately €1.8 million.
The second charge is more technical. Prosecutors accuse him of participating in the misappropriation of funds invested by customers by unlawfully modifying, deleting or adding data in the exchange’s IT systems, and by influencing their automated processing.
Roman Ż. has denied the allegations and provided detailed explanations. His lawyer says that his client was connected only to BitBay between 2014 and 2018 and had no role at Zondacrypto.
The presumption of innocence therefore remains fully intact.
A planned trip to China hastened his arrest
The timing of the arrest was not incidental.
Polish authorities say they decided to act on a Saturday after learning that Roman Ż. was due to leave Poland for China. The prosecution is now citing three reasons for seeking his pretrial detention: the potentially severe sentence, the risk of pressure being brought to bear on witnesses or evidence, and the risk of fleeing abroad.
For the second charge, the maximum sentence mentioned is 10 years in prison. The prosecution has submitted its request to the Katowice-East court, which must rule on the detention.
Lawyer Błażej Gazda disputes the interpretation of the trip, however. According to him, his client was traveling to China for business and already had a return ticket for September 13. He also points out that Roman Ż. had already traveled there in June before returning to Poland.
This disagreement reflects the current state of the case: prosecutors believe they have sufficiently serious grounds to act quickly, while the defense rejects the criminal interpretation placed on several facts.
At this stage, the court will rule only on the question of detention. Not guilt.
More than 3,600 customers turned to the courts
The scale of the investigation explains the resources being deployed.
When the Katowice Regional Prosecutor’s Office provided an official update on June 22, it had already recorded more than 3,600 reports from people claiming to be victims. Nearly 1,000 of them had been interviewed, along with around 40 other witnesses who had information about how the exchange operated.
Investigators had seized 162 electronic devices and more than 250 terabytes of files from Zondacrypto’s production servers. No fewer than 63 searches or requests for the handover of documents had been carried out.
Customer losses are estimated by prosecutors at at least 350 million zlotys, or approximately $94 million. That amount may change as claims continue to be examined.
This is therefore no longer simply a matter of a few blocked withdrawals.
Prosecutors are seeking to reconstruct several years of the platform’s financial and IT activity. The platform had more than one million registered users after BitBay became Zondacrypto in 2021.
And that is where the case becomes much more serious.
The mystery of the 4,500 BTC dates back to 2022
One piece of information published when the investigation opened deserves closer attention.
On April 17, the Katowice prosecutor’s office stated that the exchange’s owner had reported that Zondacrypto had no longer had access since 2022 to a cold wallet containing approximately 4,500 BTC. The authorities also say that this information may have been concealed from customers.
With Bitcoin close to $79,000 on September 7, 4,500 BTC would theoretically represent approximately $355 million.
The comparison is striking: the theoretical value of those bitcoins far exceeds the 350 million zlotys in losses currently recorded among users.
However, the two figures should not be mechanically added together.
The prosecution has not said that 4,500 BTC were stolen, nor that the wallet still holds exactly that amount today. It reported a loss of access dating back to 2022. Based on the publicly available information, it is also unclear what proportion directly corresponded to customer holdings.
That distinction matters.
The investigation must precisely reconstruct the actual accounting of the assets, obligations to users and movements carried out over several years.
BitBay, Zondacrypto and four years of unanswered questions
Zondacrypto did not emerge in 2026.
The platform was founded in Poland in 2014 under the name BitBay, before becoming Zonda and then Zondacrypto. Sylwester Suszek was one of its central figures. Roman Ż. is described as his former associate and as someone who participated in BitBay’s management before the rebranding.
The visible problems accelerated this year.
Users began reporting delayed or blocked withdrawals. In February, Zondacrypto acknowledged payment delays for some customers. On March 17, Bitcoin deposits were suspended, officially because of market volatility. The website subsequently became inaccessible and operations ceased in April.
Meanwhile, Estonia’s financial intelligence authority had partially suspended the license of BB Trade Estonia OÜ, the company operating the brand, preventing it in particular from receiving new assets.
On a centralized exchange, day-to-day operations depend precisely on this trust: the balance displayed on screen must correspond to assets that are actually available and recoverable.
Debates surrounding the insolvency rumors involving Binance previously examined by Bref Crypto had shown the difference between a rumor and verifiable operational signs.
At Zondacrypto, problematic withdrawals ultimately led to criminal proceedings and bankruptcy.
Sylwester Suszek’s disappearance changes the entire case
The investigation took on another dimension on July 30, 2026.
Prosecutors decided to merge the Zondacrypto case with a much older proceeding concerning the disappearance of Sylwester Suszek. The authorities believe that the circumstances surrounding the creation and operation of BitBay and then Zondacrypto could help explain what happened to him.
Suszek disappeared on March 10, 2022.
Polish police say he had left his home for a business meeting in Czeladź. After the meeting, at around 3 p.m., he left in an unknown direction. He never contacted his family again. His missing-person notice remains available in the police’s official database.
Recent court documents now go further than simply referring to a “disappearance.”
In the statement announcing the charges against Radosław P., prosecutors describe one subject of the investigation as the unlawful deprivation of Sylwester Suszek’s liberty. This is not yet a judicial conclusion about what happened, but the legal classification clearly shows that investigators are now exploring a criminal lead.
The financial case and the missing-person case are now officially intertwined.
Three other suspects are already in custody
Roman Ż. is not entering an empty case.
On September 2, investigators had already detained Anna P., Jaromira W. and Rafał Z. All three have since been placed in pretrial detention for three months. None has admitted to the allegations against them.
The accusations are particularly serious.
Anna P. is suspected in particular of participating in a group seeking to appropriate Sylwester Suszek’s assets. Prosecutors also accuse her of transactions that caused damage to Zondacrypto’s operator, including the transfer without payment of a property in Katowice valued at 700,000 zlotys.
More unusually, prosecutors accuse her of obstructing the investigation into Suszek by having the hard drive from a gas station’s video-surveillance system removed and taken away, and by encouraging false testimony.
Jaromira W. is suspected of transactions involving nearly €8 million, including the purchase of property in France, as well as the alleged laundering of 7.5 million zlotys.
Rafał Z. is accused of misappropriating 1.7 million zlotys belonging to the operator.
The financial scale therefore already far exceeds the 7.8 million zlotys alleged against Roman Ż.
The Olympic chief is also facing charges
Another branch of the case directly concerns Poland’s sports institutions.
Radosław Piesiewicz, president of the Polish Olympic Committee, was arrested on August 27 and targeted on two separate charges. He disputes the allegations.
The first concerns possible influence peddling. According to prosecutors, he allegedly claimed to have influence with Poland’s competition authority, UOKiK, and accepted a benefit in the form of a watch valued at 169,476 zlotys.
The second concerns actions carried out when BB Trade Estonia was already at risk of becoming insolvent. Prosecutors accuse him of inducing a member of the operator’s board to make payments of 194,420.15 zlotys on April 7, followed by €100,000 on April 8, potentially to the detriment of the exchange’s other creditors.
Here again, these elements are judicial allegations, not definitively established facts.
Prosecutors have also seized documents from the Polish Olympic Committee and UOKiK as part of their investigation.
Zondacrypto is no longer merely a case of exchange management. Investigators are now examining property transactions, institutional relationships and possible benefits granted around a company that was already close to insolvency.
The investigation now spans five countries
One of the most underestimated aspects of the case is its cross-border nature.
As early as May 28, Poland and Estonia established a Joint Investigation Team so that prosecutors could exchange evidence and intelligence directly. The structure is logical: BB Trade Estonia OÜ, the entity operating Zondacrypto, was registered in Estonia, while a large share of its users and history are in Poland.
Polish investigators have also coordinated their work with Monaco and sent requests for mutual legal assistance to Italy and Switzerland.
In July, prosecutors secured the freezing of €4 million deposited with the French branch of a bank. According to investigators, the money came from the sale of a Monegasque company owned by people suspected in the investigation. A French judge ordered the funds to remain in an account controlled by the French judicial authorities.
This is an important development for victims.
A crypto investigation is not limited to tracking wallets on a blockchain. Once funds pass through companies, property, banks or cross-border structures, the case becomes very conventional again: seizures, judicial cooperation, bank accounts and the identification of beneficiaries.
The blockchain does not erase other trails.
Zondacrypto’s operator is now officially bankrupt
The exchange’s legal position has also changed.
On August 27, 2026, Harju County Court in Tallinn officially declared BB Trade Estonia OÜ, Zondacrypto’s operator, bankrupt. Poland’s prosecution service has since published a procedure for creditors.
People with claims arising before the bankruptcy must submit them to the trustee, Margus Lentsius, within two months of publication of the decision.
The first creditors’ meeting is scheduled for September 17 in Tallinn.
This civil aspect is separate from the criminal investigation.
Even if prosecutors one day prove that crimes were committed, that does not automatically mean that all customers will recover their assets in full. Recovery will also depend on the assets actually located, judicial seizures, the ranking of claims and the Estonian bankruptcy proceedings.
This is the risk often overlooked when a platform holds cryptocurrencies on behalf of its users: a claim against an exchange is not legally or operationally identical to bitcoins whose keys you control directly. Bref Crypto’s Bitcoin guide details this distinction between self-custody and an intermediary.
Zondacrypto now provides a particularly costly illustration of it.
The case now goes beyond the simple bankruptcy of an exchange
The fifth suspect is attracting attention on September 7. Yet it is no longer the most important figure in the case.
3,600 complaints. Estimated losses of 350 million zlotys. 250 terabytes of seized data. Nearly €8 million at the center of one of the transactions under investigation. €4 million frozen in France. And, above all, the approximately 4,500 BTC that the platform reportedly lost access to as early as 2022 without informing users, according to prosecutors.
The disappearance of Sylwester Suszek four years earlier must now be added to that list.
It is this connection that fundamentally changes the nature of the investigation. If the case concerned only an exchange’s inability to reimburse its customers, it could still be viewed as a particularly poorly managed crypto bankruptcy. Prosecutors are now examining suspicions of computer fraud, misappropriation of funds, money laundering, asset transfers, obstruction of an investigation and influence peddling.
None of these accusations yet amounts to a conviction.
But the information officially released already shows one thing: Zondacrypto’s collapse probably did not begin when withdrawals were blocked in 2026. Investigators are now tracing the case back to 2022, the year the exchange reportedly lost access to its cold wallet and its founder disappeared.
This timeline, much more than the arrest of a fifth suspect, explains why the case is becoming one of the most significant crypto investigations currently under way in Europe.
