I've spent a lot of time in Serbia. Put it like this: If they put a bounty on his capture, Do Kwon isn't going to last five minutes. (I can tell you right now that he's 80% likely to be holed up in a condo in one of the new Belgrade Waterfront developments. He'd stick out like a sore thumb anywhere else.)
An interesting fact about Serbia is that all visiting foreigners are required to register at their neighborhood police station & provide the cops with an address, passport details, and contact details. Usually the hotels will do this for you automatically. Basically, though, what this means for Do Kwon is that he already has a searchable file.
Hey... Wait... do these new SEC charges mean that there is now a bounty? Maybe I ought to make some calls.
> all visiting foreigners are required to register at their neighborhood police station & provide the cops with an address, passport details, and contact details
Yeah, because a criminal mastermind is going to be bothered with a detail like that. Most tourist don't do this bureaucratic step.
China has been cultivating closer ties with Serbia in order to establish a presence in Europe. Chinese people no longer attract any attention in Belgrade.
There's a Chinese community in Belgrade, but it's fairly small, very blue-collar, and their residences aren't concentrated in any one neighborhood or location. (There is a "Chinese mall" where they hang out. This is a run-down place, nearly half of which was recently destroyed by fire, where you can buy cheap electronics and Chinese-import foods.) These Chinese immigrants are rarely able to speak or understand English and mostly speak Mandarin and Serbian.
They have nothing in common with Do Kwon, and it's unlikely that he'd be able to hide among them.
They are required to do so, but nobody ever does. I've been there for work several times over the last years and had checked up on that before going and people there told me not to bother and that the police really didn't care and might not even do the registration.
If you stay at a hotel, they usually take care of it for you automatically. That is, the hotel will send your relevant details to the nearest police office, in a batch with everybody else who checked in that day. You typically won't be aware of it.
It's not a universal practice, though. But I'd bet that somebody like Do Kwon, like most people, stayed at a hotel for at least a few nights after landing in Belgrade.
Ah good point, yes, you are probably right. I did not stay in hotels though. But your point is well taken, the same used to be the case in France for hotels and even campings.
Real estate prices are way up in Belgrade recently due to refugees coming from Ukraine and Russia. Probably some money laundering as well. The listings linked above are for the new Belgrade Waterfront development, which is a fairly desirable location.
Depending on which side of the divide they were from, yes, sure. Also lots of ethnic Russians that found their environment suddenly a lot less friendly from the Baltics.
Most ethnic Russians I know from Ukraine don’t support the invasion.
One had weird men show up to her neighbourhood in Donetsk for years, that didn’t speak Russian like anyone else from Donetsk, and violently confront locals and then the police. This is the “violence against ethnic Russians” that Putin made up.
It has to be so frustrating for the many ethnic Russians in Ukraine to see their lives upended like this and to be negatively associated with something that they had absolutely no say in. I recall a bit of video footage from early on in the war where a native Russian from the South East of Ukraine told a bunch of Russian soldiers to go home and leave the people there in peace. They were getting along quite well until Russia stirred the pot. Some of them now even refuse to speak Russian.
The foreigner address registration thing isn't actually enforced. No one bothers to do it anymore, at least not if they're staying at a private residence.
Take note, crypto people. The days of instructing people about how the code is the contract, centralized exchanges are DeFi, Web 3.0 fixes all the issues, etc. - those days appear to be numbered.
The problem is that most of the DeFi is either actually centralized in some way and are lying to the clients, or they are truly decentralized and therefore any bug in the programming will take it down immediately, see dozens of "hacks" of DeFi bridges just last year alone, each one in tens or hundreds of millions in equivalent.
Hey, have you heard about BarnCoin? It's the newest cryptocurrency on the block, and it's a game-changer. The beauty of BarnCoin lies in its ability to do anything as long as the blockchain is co-resident with the hashgraph. Any sensible DeFi runs the co-residency requirements over the actions in this way, anyway.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63940181#:~:text=South%20K....