Two men were on Monday handed prison sentences of 45,376 and a half years each in Turkey for operating a ponzi scheme which funnelled part of its earnings through northern Cyprus.

The pair, ringleader Mehmet Aydin and his older brother Fatih Aydin, had founded and operated a scheme called the “Ciftlik Bank”, and had been found guilty of establishing a criminal organisation and fraud.

Their scheme, called Ciftlik Bank, defrauded users of over 1.6 billion TL (around €250 million in 2017), with Turkey’s Capital Markets Board (SPK) having estimated that over 100m TL of that (around €16m at the time) was transferred to a company in Cyprus called Fame Game, and then onwards to the Aydins’ personal accounts.

According to the BBC, Mehmet Aydin had said he set up Fame Game in the north “to avoid paying tax”, while news website Haber Global reported that his brother was listed as a co-founder “because companies in Cyprus had to be established with at least two partners”.

They were found guilty on a total of 4,414 counts at Istanbul’s Anadolu court, though both pleaded their innocence.

“I did not do it with the intention of defrauding people. I did not defraud anyone. I had no intention of defrauding people,” Mehmet Aydin, who had previously been a rapper, told the court.

The sentence is the second-longest to have been given in recorded history, with only Chamoy Thipyaso, the Thai woman who was sentenced to 141,078 years behind bars after setting up a pyramid scheme of her own, having been handed a longer sentence.

Ciftlik Bank was founded by the Aydin brothers in 2016 as an “online game”, and allowed those partaking to purchase “virtual animals and produce” for real money.

It was claimed that the virtual animals were actually real animals being raised in various facilities in Turkey, and that as such, users could hope to see a return on investment when the meat and milk from the virtual animals was sold.

Around half a million users signed up to the scheme, but a complaint was filed towards the end of 2017 to Turkey’s Capital Markets Board (SPK) after the promised return on investment failed to materialise.

Mehmet Aydin’s then-wife Sila Sosyal was detained shortly afterwards, but he was later spotted in Uruguay driving a Ferrari. After being a wanted man for around three years, he surrendered to Turkey’s consulate in the Brazilian city of Sao Paolo in 2021, before being flown back to the country.