The Debtor Who Wasn’t on the Books

Rafał Zaorski, Poland’s loudest trader, was led into a prosecutor’s office in Katowice. The ledgers of the exchange he once served remember almost nothing about him, and that is the most revealing thing about them.

Wednesday, September 2, 2026. On Wita Stwosza Street, in Katowice, officers of Poland’s Central Bureau for Combating Cybercrime escort a man in his forties through the doors of the Silesian branch of the National Prosecutor’s Office. The man is Rafał Zaorski, for a decade the most conspicuous speculator in the country, a trader who built a following by turning his brokerage account into a spectator sport. He manages one sentence for the reporters on the sidewalk: “I am a victim.” The prosecutor’s communiqué refers to him only as R.Z., and notes that the detainees are being brought in “for the announcement of decisions to present charges.” The same morning, police detain two women, identified as J.W. and A.P., and search their homes, seizing cash, watches, jewelry, and cars. According to unconfirmed reporting by TVN24 and Onet, one is the former wife of Marian W., the principal suspect in the disappearance of Sylwester Suszek, the founder of the BitBay exchange, who vanished in 2022; the other ran a fuel depot connected to his businesses. As I write, we do not know what Zaorski has been charged with, if anything. We do not know what he has told investigators. Everything that follows is a reading of public documents and published reporting, not a verdict on anyone’s guilt.

The thesis that grows out of that reading is this: in its own books, BitBay looks less like an exchange than like a pocketbook shared by the people around Sylwester Suszek. The task of keeping Poland’s largest crypto market liquid was handed to an Internet personality whose only company with a known financial statement had no sales. And a reliable balance sheet for BitBay probably never existed. What existed were successive versions of a total that had to add up on December 31st.

Rewind almost six years, to the last day of 2020. Suszek, then the boss of BitBay, presses record and calls Zaorski. He does not ask about the markets. He tells Zaorski that he owes him money on a scale that “cannot be described,” that “with this Dubai thing you went way too far,” and that he has “no debtor like you.” Zaorski does not deny it. He says he has a “debt” to Suszek, that he lost “a lot, a great deal of my own,” and that he regrets not having “let it go in 2018.” No figure is mentioned. The recording was published by the daily Rzeczpospolita on April 24, 2026; prosecutors confirmed it was authentic and placed it in the case file.

If, in December of 2020, the president of BitBay had the largest debtor of his life, that debtor ought to appear in the company’s books. So I checked. On my desk is the complete run of financial statements of BitBay sp. z o.o., the Polish limited-liability company registered under number 0000373405, for the years 2016 through 2020: balance sheets, income statements, explanatory notes, management reports for 2016, 2017, 2019, and 2020, and the minutes of a shareholders’ meeting held on December 8, 2017, all downloaded from the Polish court registry’s repository of financial documents. Zaorski is not in them. Neither is Krypto Jam, his company. There is no loan to a market maker, no receivable from one, no write-down on a debt that would later become the subject of a lawsuit for thirty-two million zloty. What there is, instead, is a balance sheet that swelled to a hundred and six million zloty in 2018, in which nearly every large line item has no name attached. (A zloty is worth roughly a quarter of a dollar; a hundred and six million zloty is, give or take, twenty-seven million dollars.) I wrote in April about how this company grew and how it was quietly struck from the registry while everyone was looking elsewhere. Today’s arrest sends me back to the same documents with one narrower question: where, in all of this, is Krypto Jam?

What Suszek Alleged, and What Survived in Court

Start with what is certain, meaning what is documented or adjudicated.

Krypto Jam S.A. (registry No. 0000717002) was entered in the commercial register on February 6, 2018, a joint-stock company with share capital of a hundred and three thousand zloty, divided into 2,060,000 shares with a nominal value of five grosz apiece, roughly a penny. Its president and sole board member was Rafał Zaorski. On May 18, 2018, he announced on Facebook a contract with BitBay “worth twenty million zloty,” which, as the trade press reported at the time, was to cover the tokenization of shares, the placement of initial coin offerings, and crypto trading for institutional clients. The announcement came days after BitBay said it was moving its operations to Malta. In practice, as Rzeczpospolita, the news portal Wirtualna Polska, and former employees describe it, Krypto Jam became BitBay’s market maker: its job was to generate Bitcoin trading volume on the exchange. It hired ten traders. Each was given three Bitcoin and a hundred and fifty thousand zloty a month to work with. The money, the traders say, came from Suszek. The arrangement lasted less than a year.

On June 18, 2018, a month after the BitBay deal, Krypto Jam announced that it had found a strategic investor. A Dubai company called Atriumbay Investment subscribed for sixty thousand Series B shares at 33.34 zloty each, a shade over two million zloty, and on that basis Krypto Jam valued itself at more than sixty-eight million. Zaorski explained the provenance of his new partner in public: “We at Krypto Jam did market making and arbitrage for one of the firms Atriumbay had invested in.” Krypto Jam made a market on exactly one exchange. An investor in that exchange, from Dubai, was now buying into the market maker. I will return to this, because Dubai shows up in BitBay’s books earlier than some of the recent reporting suggests.

In 2023, BB Trade Estonia OÜ, the Estonian company that by then operated the exchange under its new name, Zondacrypto, sued Krypto Jam in the Warsaw Regional Court for more than 6.2 million zloty plus interest and for the return of a hundred and fifty Bitcoin plus interest, a claim worth, at the exchange rate of the day it was filed, more than thirty-two million zloty. The legal basis was a loan. No one had written the loan down. Its terms, the complaint said, were to be reconstructed from e-mails, messenger chats, and the “history of exchange accounts kept first at BitBay and later at Zondacrypto.” The defense argued that the Bitcoin had not been a loan at all but working capital for market making. On April 24, 2026, the court issued a partial judgment dismissing the claim for the hundred and fifty Bitcoin; the case over 6,285,037.10 zloty continues. Several Polish outlets reported that day that the court had “awarded” that sum. The court itself confirmed to Rzeczpospolita only the dismissal of the Bitcoin claim and the continuation of the rest, so I go with the court. On August 27, 2026, a court in Harju County declared BB Trade Estonia bankrupt, and the claim against Krypto Jam became an asset of a bankruptcy estate administered by a trustee named Margus Lentsius. That matters to the exchange’s customers, and I will come back to it.

That is what we know. The rest is in the ledgers.

Five Balance Sheets, One Company

BitBay sp. z o.o. was founded in Katowice, the capital of Poland’s coal country, under articles dated February 7, 2014. In 2016 its vice-president was Marek Knisz, its address was a flat at 2/6 Zacisze Street, and its share capital was raised from five thousand to a hundred thousand zloty. From 2017 the president was Sylwester Suszek and the address was 45 Kępowa Street. The figures for five years, in zloty at year-end, look like this:

* A loan to a related party.
** Shown in the 2017 balance sheet as “other short-term financial assets”; in the comparative figures of the 2018 statement, the same amount appears under “loans granted.”
*** Total short-term receivables, in the abbreviated balance sheet of a micro-entity.

Read it year by year, because each year tells a different part of the same story.

2017: A Profit That Evaporated in Financial Costs

In 2017, the peak of the crypto boom, BitBay’s revenue grew seventyfold, to 42.6 million zloty. Operating costs were 8.9 million. Profit on sales: 33.7 million. Operating profit: 33.5 million. And then a single line in the income statement swallows nearly all of it. Financial costs: 32,744,392.59 zloty, of which interest accounts for 2,607,432.11 and “other” for 29,953,985.17. Pre-tax profit falls to 894,869.17 zloty, income tax is 343,554, and net profit is 551,315.17. The management report for 2017 spends not one word on this. It notes a “dramatic rise in revenue” and a profit “in the amount of 551,315.17 zloty.”

Where does 2.6 million in interest come from, in a company that had no borrowings a year earlier? The balance sheet answers: at the end of 2017, under short-term liabilities to non-related parties, in the line for “loans and credits,” there is 26,607,239.34 zloty. The statement does not say who lent twenty-six million zloty to a company with negative equity, or on what terms. The note on related-party transactions in the following years reads, year after year, “Not applicable.” Where do thirty million zloty in “other” financial costs come from, in a year when Bitcoin rose more than tenfold? The documents do not say. In my April analysis I suggested the most probable explanation: the gap between what customers deposited and what they withdrew after prices had risen. That remains a hypothesis the statements do not allow anyone to confirm.

The balance sheet at the end of 2017 is not yet illegible on its own: 40.5 million in cash, 3.8 million in other financial assets, 47.8 million in short-term liabilities, of which 19.3 million are “other” (presumably customer balances) and 26.6 million are the loans just mentioned. A year later the picture falls apart.

2018: The Cash Disappears and Loans with No Names Appear

Twenty-eighteen is the Krypto Jam year. BitBay’s revenue falls forty-five per cent, to 23.7 million zloty; from May, the operating business shifts to Malta, to a company called Pinewood Holdings Limited, and the revenue goes with it. Outsourced-services costs rise from 5.8 to 9.5 million. Net profit is 9,633,351.29 zloty. Income tax: zero. The accumulated losses that might explain a zero tax bill amounted to just under 340,000 zloty at the start of the year. The discrepancy demands an explanation; the statement offers none.

The balance sheet grows from 48 to 106 million zloty, and its structure changes completely. Cash falls from 40.5 million to 2.0 million. In its place come two items: “loans granted” to non-related parties, 37,259,819.46 zloty, and “other receivables,” 65,689,817.72. On the liabilities side, “other” short-term liabilities rise from 19.3 to 80.5 million. In plain terms: at the end of 2018 the company owed someone, most likely its customers, about eighty million zloty, and that debt was covered by two million in cash, thirty-seven million in loans to unnamed borrowers, and sixty-six million in receivables from unnamed debtors.

Note 22 explains the loans in one sentence: “Loans granted in the course of the Company’s core business.” BitBay’s core business, by its own description, was Internet portals, data processing, and payment intermediation. Lending thirty-seven million zloty was not on the list. Moreover, interest income in the 2018 income statement is zero. Thirty-seven million zloty in loans that earn no interest are either interest-free loans, or loans on which nobody bothered to accrue interest, or something that is a loan in name only. In 2019 the balance falls by exactly 960,000 zloty, to 36,299,819.46, and there it freezes. There is no impairment on the loans in any year.

There are smaller signals, too, of the kind an auditor would call red flags. Assets under construction, 1.38 million zloty at the start of 2018 and increased by 2.21 million during the year, vanish from the balance sheet through a “reclassification” of 3.52 million without landing in any category of fixed assets; in the same year the income statement shows a 1.54-million loss on the disposal of non-financial fixed assets, and of vehicles with a gross value of 740,000 zloty the company disposes of 654,000. Trade payables at the end of 2018 are ninety-six per cent overdue, 346,000 of them by more than a year, in a company reporting a 9.6-million profit. Trade receivables are overdue in their entirety. Note 15 discloses a “correction of fundamental errors” that reduces equity by 210,733 zloty, without saying what the errors were. Accrued liabilities of 288,774.48 zloty do not change by a single grosz from 2016 to 2019. There is no cash-flow statement and no auditor’s report, although the thresholds in Article 64(1) of Poland’s Accounting Act of September 29, 1994, were exceeded; I noted this in April as well.

And then there is the calendar. The 2018 statement reached the registry on March 13, 2020, eight months past the filing deadline, and its notes bear the same date of preparation as the notes for 2019: March 31, 2020. The two statements were written at the same time, with full knowledge of what had happened in 2019. The Accounting Act requires approval within six months of the balance-sheet date (Article 53(1)) and filing within fifteen days of approval (Article 69(1)). This was not a first. The shareholders’ meeting approving the 2016 statement was held on December 8, 2017, more than five months late, and in its minutes Resolution No. 3 is followed by Resolution No. 5. There is no No. 4.

2019 and 2020: A Frozen Balance Sheet and a Company That “Does Not Prepare a Management Report”

From 2019, BitBay sp. z o.o. stops being an exchange. The management report dated May 14, 2020, says so outright: until November, 2019, the company lived on fees for licensing the exchange to Pinewood Holdings Limited, in Malta, and from November, 2019, on fees from BB Trade Estonia OÜ. Revenue: 158,777.61 zloty. Loss: 359,355.66. But the balance sheet does not shrink with the business. It stays at 105 million: 65.7 million in “other receivables,” 36.3 million in loans, 80.7 million in “other liabilities,” 14.2 million in loans received. A company with licensing income of about thirteen thousand zloty a month, roughly the salary of a mid-level Polish manager, carries ninety-six million in liabilities on its books and explains them to no one. The note on related-party transactions: “Not applicable,” although its only counterparties are successive incarnations of the same exchange.

In 2020 the company reclassifies itself as a “micro-entity,” taking advantage of every simplification that Article 3(1a) and Appendix 4 of the Accounting Act allow: a balance sheet of a few lines, no breakdown of receivables, no disclosure of cash, no notes on the loans. Revenue: 205.29 zloty, about fifty dollars. Loss: 66,924.71. In the additional information the board declares that “the entity does not prepare a management report,” while a management report dated September 1, 2021, is nonetheless filed with the registry, in which Sylwester Suszek writes that, owing to the pandemic, activity “was reduced to the absolute minimum” and that “circumstances exist indicating a threat to the continuation of the Company’s business.” Six months later he will disappear. The company will never file another statement, and on February 17, 2026, the district court in Katowice will strike it from the registry without liquidation, finding that it has no assets. A hundred and six million zloty of assets on the last balance sheet will leave no document behind.

Three things in these two years catch a lawyer’s eye. First, share capital. The management reports for 2019 and 2020 give it as 105,000 zloty divided into 2,100 shares; the balance sheets and notes for the same years show 100,000 zloty and 2,000 shares. Second, ownership. In December, 2017, the shareholders were Arial Investment in Commercial Enterprises L.L.C. (38.5 per cent), Skybay Investment in Commercial Enterprises L.L.C. (47 per cent), and two individuals. A year later the individuals are gone, replaced by a third company from the same family, Central Bay Investment in Commercial Enterprises L.L.C. (15 per cent). “Investment in Commercial Enterprises L.L.C.” is the boilerplate suffix of holding companies registered in Dubai. Rzeczpospolita reported in April that Suszek had moved his shares to three Emirati companies “before he disappeared.” The documents show something more: two of those companies were already BitBay’s shareholders in 2017, and the third arrived in 2018. The Dubai structure predates the Krypto Jam deal; it did not follow it. Third, the name of the investor that bought into Krypto Jam in June, 2018: Atriumbay Investment, of Dubai. Skybay, Central Bay, Atriumbay. Zaorski himself said that Atriumbay had invested in the firm for which Krypto Jam made a market. Whether Atriumbay belongs to the same group as BitBay’s shareholders cannot be established from Polish documents; it is a hypothesis that only an authority with access to Emirati registries can test. If it were confirmed, the two million zloty from a “strategic investor” would turn out to be one more channel through which money from BitBay’s orbit flowed to Krypto Jam, and “with this Dubai thing you went way too far” would acquire a very specific meaning. If it were not confirmed, a coincidence of names would remain a coincidence of names.

Where in These Books Is Krypto Jam?

Back to the question I started with. The debt that Suszek called the largest of his life, and that the exchange’s operator priced at thirty-two million zloty in its lawsuit, must have arisen in 2018, during the Krypto Jam engagement. It should therefore be visible in BitBay’s balance sheet as of December 31, 2018. I see two possibilities, and neither speaks well of the statements.

The first: the Krypto Jam debt is hidden inside an aggregate. On December 31, 2018, Bitcoin traded at about fourteen thousand zloty, so a hundred and fifty Bitcoin were worth about 2.1 million; with 6.2 million on top, that comes to roughly 8.3 million zloty. The amount fits comfortably inside the 37.3 million in “loans granted to non-related parties.” If that is where it sits, then the company lent tens of millions of zloty without disclosing a single borrower, without accruing interest, and without booking an impairment even when its president, according to Rzeczpospolita, was recording the debtor to have evidence for court. The 2019 statement, signed on March 31, 2020, nine months before that phone call but after former traders quoted by Rzeczpospolita recall Suszek storming into the Krypto Jam office “furious,” contains no write-down on such a receivable. Neither does the 2020 statement, signed in September, 2021, nine months after the call. The prudence principle in Article 7(1) of the Accounting Act requires a company to reflect any diminution in the value of its assets. Here nothing was reflected.

The second possibility, in my view more probable though no better proved, follows from the lawsuit itself. BB Trade Estonia had no loan agreement; it reconstructed the terms from the “history of exchange accounts kept first at BitBay and later at Zondacrypto.” That suggests the money for Krypto Jam never left the company as a loan booked in the general ledger. It was credited to Krypto Jam’s trading account on the exchange as a user balance, and then withdrawn. A user account funded without a deposit is a liability of the exchange to a user with no corresponding asset. When the user withdraws, the liability vanishes, and cash or Bitcoin belonging to other customers leaves the common pool. No receivable arises in the general ledger, because formally no one lent anyone anything. What arises is a hole. That is precisely the title of an internal spreadsheet dated July 7, 2021, which Wirtualna Polska obtained: “Dziura,” the Hole, a currency-by-currency comparison of customer balances against actual holdings, totalling minus 150,587,368.73 euros. Asked whether that figure includes the money passed to Zaorski, a former exchange employee tells the WP reporters: “Yes. All of it was taken from customer accounts.” That is the word of an anonymous source, and the portal itself notes that the source is a person within the investigation’s orbit; I treat it accordingly, as a lead rather than as evidence. But if it is true, the Krypto Jam debt is absent from BitBay’s balance sheet because BitBay’s balance sheet never saw it. Only the exchange’s database did. The claim “migrated” to BB Trade Estonia along with the user-account database, because the account, not a contract, was what carried it. That would explain why an Estonian operator founded in 2019 sued over money paid out by a Polish company in 2018, and why the Polish company could be struck from the registry in 2026 as having no assets.

There is another side to this same bookkeeping. Krypto Jam’s management report for 2018, as quoted in February, 2020, by the blog Forex Random Walk, reports a loss of 249,101.43 zloty “with no sales.” I have not seen the original document, and before publication it should be checked against the registry copy. If the quotation is faithful, then a company that announced a contract “worth twenty million zloty,” received two million from an investor, and employed ten traders at three Bitcoin and a hundred and fifty thousand zloty a month each, reported not a single zloty of revenue in 2018. A market-making fee, if that is what it was, as the defense now claims, would have to be Krypto Jam’s revenue. A loan, if that is what it was, as the complaint claims, would have to be Krypto Jam’s liability. Either leaves a trace in a financial statement. A source in the community of aggrieved BigShortBets investors told Rzeczpospolita that Zaorski “for years did not file financial statements for his companies.” We would then have two companies between which millions of zloty and hundreds of Bitcoin moved in 2018, and two sets of books in which those movements do not occur. If the exchange employees’ accounts are true, customer money passed from one balance sheet to another without touching either. That sentence is a reconstruction, not a finding; findings belong to the prosecutor.

The Rulebook That Forbade It Outright

Here it is worth reaching for a document no one in this affair has yet cited in public. BitBay’s terms of service in force until November 8, 2018, that is, for the entire period of the Krypto Jam engagement, provided in Section 2 that funds deposited by users toward future transactions “remain at the exclusive disposal of the User (BitBay has no ability to dispose of the accumulated funds beyond the instructions given by Users).” The March, 2017, version contained the identical clause. This is not a statute. It is a contractual undertaking by the exchange to every customer. A customer who wired zloty or sent Bitcoin did not hand them to the exchange to own or to trade with. The customer entrusted them.

If, then, the money for Krypto Jam came from customer balances, as former employees claim and as the structure of the lawsuit can be read to imply, we would not be looking at an informal loan between two businessmen but at the disposal of entrusted property, contrary to the agreement with its owners, in favor of a third party. In the language of Poland’s Criminal Code of June 6, 1997, such fact patterns are usually examined under the provisions on misappropriation of entrusted property (Article 284, Section 2), abuse of trust in business (Article 296, Section 1), and, on the recipient’s side, the provisions on receiving property derived from a prohibited act (Articles 291 and 292). I do not claim that any of these provisions was violated, or by whom; I have not seen the evidence, and I have not heard the detainee’s account. I point out only that the word “loan” in the Estonian company’s complaint civilizes an event that, under the rulebook, was not civilized. The exchange could not lend its customers’ money, because the money was not the exchange’s. Whoever holds the key to the pocketbook does not need a loan agreement, and that is exactly why there is none. An exchange that lends other people’s money is not a creditor. It is a debtor pretending to be a creditor. And if Zaorski, as Suszek suggests on the tape, obtained funds by saying “in Dubai that he needed them and would send them back,” and then did not, that would be, from Suszek’s point of view, a swindle, and from the customers’ point of view Suszek and his debtor would stand on the same side: both disposing of something that belonged to neither. “I am a victim,” said today outside the prosecutor’s office, and “I have a debt to you,” said on New Year’s Eve, 2020, may both be true. A victim of Suszek’s. A debtor, in this hypothesis, to thirty thousand people whose money they were both moving around. I repeat: a hypothesis, not a finding.

Zaorski’s Results, or What the Market Never Said

On the tape, Suszek says something about his interlocutor that is both brutal and checkable: a man who said he “made millions” had in truth “lost millions.” What does that arithmetic look like in documents rather than in live streams?

The Zaorski legend begins in 2015 with a live broadcast in which he claimed to turn thirty-five thousand zloty into a million. On that show he built a community called Trading Jam Session, some twenty-three thousand members strong by 2018, and a reputation as the biggest speculator in the country. The results that can be verified on paper look different. Krypto Jam, his only company with a publicly quoted financial statement, had no sales in its most active year and closed it at a loss. The Trading Jam Foundation had revenue of just under twenty-nine thousand zloty in 2016. And this is the most unsettling detail in the entire story: the liquidity of Poland’s largest cryptocurrency exchange was provided by a man whose best-documented result is a live stream. In June and July of 2018, as Krypto Jam’s president negotiating a partnership with Merlin Group, a listed e-commerce company, he bought Merlin shares before the partnership was announced; on June 30, 2025, the Warsaw Regional Court convicted him of insider trading and fined him two hundred and fifty thousand zloty, and in April, 2026, the appellate court upheld the verdict, calling his defense “not credible.” The judgment is final; Zaorski says he will seek cassation before the Supreme Court. It is the only final criminal ruling in this account, and the only thing here that may properly be called a finding.

Then come the projects, whose common denominator is raising money from a community on the promise that this time will be different. BigShortBets, a “decentralized platform” with a token called BigSB: investors filed a criminal complaint over the disappearance of some fourteen to fifteen million zloty, alleging that funds were sent to the Kraken exchange and gambled away there; prosecutors declined to open an investigation, which means the allegation remains the investors’. The “Epic Flip” at Złota 44, the tallest residential tower in Warsaw: an apartment of four hundred and eighty-five square metres, bought in 2022 for twenty-three million zloty, was to be divided into twenty thousand digital shares worth ninety-five to a hundred million in total; in January, 2024, a court, at the request of the building’s owners’ association, barred the sale, the building’s management notified the Financial Supervision Authority, in July, 2024, Zaorski “ended the experiment” and promised refunds with a forty-four-per-cent annual bonus, and in October, 2024, he sold the apartment to Fedlan Kilicaslan, a Turkish financier wanted in Turkey for illegal gambling and money laundering and arrested in Spain in April, 2026. In August, 2026, the mixed-martial-arts promotion Fame MMA filed a complaint over roughly a million zloty advanced for promoting the token; that, too, is so far only a complaint.

On the New Year’s Eve tape, Zaorski tells Suszek about his plans: he needs to “scale up,” to “do exactly the kind of scale you did with BitBay”; he is thinking about how “to raise a fund, put the money together, then give someone the management,” someone who “likes being the face of a fund.” BigShortBets launched in 2021. Złota 44 came in 2022. BigSB investors reading the transcript today see in it what they describe, in the reporting cited above, as “rolling debts over with new projects.” I see a resemblance to a pattern I know from pyramid cases: new projects finance old obligations, and each round of fund-raising is larger than the last. A resemblance is not proof; it is a reason for someone with subpoena power to look. In April, 2026, Zaorski wrote on X that the recording amounted to “revelations torn out of context,” that he had seen the people around the exchange “behind the scenes” and had “withdrawn,” because they were “very, really very dangerous people,” and that he did not plan to leave the country for more than two weeks at a time. On August 10th he boasted that BigShortBets was up more than seven hundred and thirty per cent since the start of the year. Three weeks later, the cybercrime bureau was walking him through a door.

Caution requires separating facts from judgments. The facts are a final insider-trading fine, a quoted Krypto Jam loss with no sales, a recorded acknowledgment of debt, a thirty-two-million-zloty lawsuit, complaints by BigSB investors and Fame MMA, and a court injunction at Złota 44. The judgment is the pattern that, in my view, emerges from them. It is also true that in none of these matters has Zaorski been convicted of fraud, that in the BigShortBets matter prosecutors declined to proceed, and that today’s charges are not yet known and may concern something entirely other than Krypto Jam.

The Hours After the Arrest: A Token That Began to Vanish

There is one more strand from today, and it must be handled with the same care as the anonymous employees’ accounts. The collective 44Crew_PL, a group describing itself as white-hat hackers, which has been tracing the money flows of BigShortBets since 2024, posted on X an on-chain analysis: during the hours of Zaorski’s detention, wallets the group has long attributed to him began dumping BigSB tokens and pulling liquidity from the pool. The group says the attribution is beyond doubt, because those wallets were the ones that previously added and removed liquidity; as an example, it cites a single address that had already drained about ninety thousand USDC from the pool. The conclusion 44Crew draws is that a contingency plan for an arrest was prepared in advance, and that a trusted person is now executing it.

The effect is visible on the chart. According to CoinGecko, at 8 P.M. Warsaw time BigSB traded at 0.1738 dollars, down 66.5 per cent in twenty-four hours; the day’s range ran from 0.5194 to 0.17, the market capitalization was 1.035 million dollars, the daily volume 78,959. The price had sat flat at about fifty cents for most of the day and then, over a few hours, fell in steps to seventeen. Three weeks earlier, on August 10th, Zaorski had been bragging on X about the token’s seven-hundred-and-thirty-per-cent gain.

What follows from this, and what does not. That the transactions occurred on the blockchain is verifiable; their hashes are public. Who controlled a wallet at the moment of a transaction is not verifiable from the outside: a man detained in the morning does not sign transactions in the afternoon, so if the wallets are indeed Zaorski’s, someone else must have had access to them; the token may simply have been sold by panicked holders reacting to the news from Katowice; and 44Crew’s attribution of the addresses, as the trade portal CrypS points out, has never been independently confirmed. The history of the dispute matters, too. Since 2024, 44Crew has claimed that about 3.5 million USDC was drained from the BigShortBets liquidity pool, and later, on the basis of published transaction hashes, about 3.84 million dollars in USDC and USDT, sent to Kraken in defiance of a community vote in June, 2022; one investor, with the group’s help, filed a criminal complaint alleging fraud under Article 286 of the Criminal Code. Prosecutors declined to open a case, pointing to the investment character of the token and the absence of evidence of intent from the outset. Zaorski’s reply was that BigSB was his “personal token.” Today’s transfers give 44Crew a new argument, but they do not turn an allegation into a finding; that is a job for a forensic accountant with access to the exchanges where the funds ended up, and for a prosecutor who can ask them.

One sentence about this strand is not a hypothesis but an observation. A token that loses two-thirds of its value in the hours of its creator’s arrest says more about trust in that creator than any press release could. Whoever sold BigSB today sold it because they concluded that without Zaorski the token has nothing holding it up. It is the harshest review the market could give the project, and it delivered it in a single afternoon.

What the Books Cannot Tell Us, and Who Should Find Out

In my assessment, BitBay’s financial statements for 2016 through 2020 fall short of the standard of a true and fair presentation of the company’s financial position required by Article 4(1) of the Accounting Act. That is the assessment of a lawyer reading documents, not the finding of any authority. The problem is not isolated errors. It is that from 2018 onward more than ninety per cent of the balance sheet consists of items the statements do not explain: loans to unnamed parties, receivables from unnamed debtors, liabilities to unnamed creditors, and loans from unnamed lenders. Whether anyone is answerable for that under Article 77(2) of the same act, which criminalizes the presentation of unreliable data in a financial statement, is for others to decide.

From these books flows a list of questions that only an authority with the power to search and to seize can answer.

Who owes the 37.3 million zloty lent out in 2018, whether Krypto Jam is among the borrowers, and why those loans earned no interest. Who owes the 65.7 million in “other receivables,” and whether the debtor is Pinewood Holdings Limited, in Malta, or BB Trade Estonia OÜ, to which the business, and perhaps the customer balances, were transferred in 2018 and 2019; if so, the note “related-party transactions: not applicable” would call for an explanation. Who lent the company 26.6 million zloty in 2017 and collected 2.6 million a year in interest for it. Who owns Arial, Skybay, Central Bay, and Atriumbay, and whether they are one group. What the exchange’s user database contained in 2018 for the account of Krypto Jam S.A. and for accounts of people in Zaorski’s circle, because it is there, not in the general ledger, that the true history of this debt may be written. And, finally, what exactly “Dubai” means in a conversation on December 31, 2020, when every ownership trail from BitBay leads to the same city.

For Zondacrypto’s aggrieved customers, this strand is practical, not merely intellectual. The 6.3-million-zloty claim against Krypto Jam S.A. is today an asset of the BB Trade Estonia bankruptcy estate. It is the trustee, not the exchange’s chief executive, Przemysław Kral, who decides whether the Warsaw lawsuit proceeds, and it is the trustee who should be asked about it at the first creditors’ meeting on September 17, 2026. In parallel, the prosecutor holds an instrument the trustee lacks: the power to freeze the assets of anyone he charges. If today’s detention ends in charges against Zaorski, and we do not yet know that it will, assets frozen in that proceeding will go first to the victims who have joined the case. Whoever has not filed a complaint and a motion to be recognized as a victim has no access to that pool. Whoever does not lodge a claim with the trustee within two months of the bankruptcy notice has no access to the estate. The two tracks are independent, and neither replaces the other; I have written about this at greater length in pieces on the bankruptcy declaration, on the Estonian proceedings, and on calculating the loss.

A closing caveat, and a closing observation. The caveat: Rafał Zaorski has been detained, not convicted; we will hear his account when he chooses to give it, and every charge, if one comes, will have to be proved in court, where he enjoys the presumption of innocence like anyone else. The observation: for eight years, no one troubled to open the five statements sitting in the National Court Register and ask to whom the company had lent thirty-seven million zloty and from whom it had borrowed twenty-six. Not the Financial Supervision Authority, not any tax office, not the prosecutors who in 2024 closed an inquiry into the exchange. A balance sheet does not lie, in the sense that one cannot read a falsehood off it. It fails in a different way: one can read nothing off it at all. From 2018, this company looked like a shell with a hundred million zloty of other people’s money frozen inside it; in February, 2026, it was struck off as having no assets; and no one along the way asked whose money. A pocketbook that everyone drew from and no one counted is always empty at the end. What is new is only that someone has started asking who held the key.

Legal and factual status as of September 2, 2026, 8 P.M. Warsaw time. The charges presented to the detainees were not known at that hour. This text makes no criminal-law judgment about any person; it identifies questions that arise from public documents. The findings of 44Crew_PL regarding wallet addresses and transfers are reported as that group’s claims and have not been independently verified.

Robert Nogacki

Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.

There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.

One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).

Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.

He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.