Defrauding Istanbul’s Soccer Elite

How an indebted banker convinced players to invest in a “special fund.”

AUGUST 1, 2024

In November 2022, Semih Kaya, a six-foot tall ex-soccer player from one of Turkey’s most celebrated soccer clubs, entered a bank in Levent, the financial heart of Istanbul. According to court documents, the bank manager, a well-groomed woman in her 40s, handed him €200,000 in a laptop case. He deposited the money at the branch’s cash desk then stashed the empty case in the back seat of his car.

The next day, the case started to emit a high-pitched beeping sound. The source was an AirTag — a device that connects to an iPhone via Bluetooth — hidden inside. Distressed, he called the bank manager, Seçil Erzan. It was 11 p.m. She assured him it was nothing, that it had likely been placed there by a businessman who was infatuated with her and attempting to stalk her.  

That was a lie. Erzan had brought a businessman money in the same case earlier that week. Worried about what Erzan would do with the money, the businessman had secretly placed an AirTag inside the case to monitor its movements.

Five months later, Turkish police formally arrested Erzan. An Istanbul prosecutor charged her with fraud and forgery of private documents. As part of the trial, which began in 2023 and is ongoing, Erzan admitted to collecting over $43.9 million from three dozen people, mostly soccer players, translators, and coaches of the Galatasaray soccer club. If convicted, she faces up to 300 years in prison. Erzan’s lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment; the Galatasaray soccer club also did not respond to requests for comment by phone and email.

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Erzan, who was 45 when she was arrested, had all the trappings of a highly accomplished banker. She wore Gucci sweaters and Rolex wristwatches. One soccer player said she was the face of Denizbank on its social media accounts; another claimed she was vying for the job of CEO. (In a statement to The Dial, Denizbank denied that Erzan was ever featured as a representative of the bank on social media or that she had any prospect of being promoted to a top job within the bank.)

“I remember people saying, ‘Whenever we see Seçil, we see a dollar sign,’” Erzan later said in court.

An only child, Erzan grew up far from the glamour of the capital in a small town in Çorlu, in northwestern Turkey, where her father sold goods in open bazaars. She studied geological engineering at a college in İzmit, but after earthquakes leveled the city in 1999, she returned to her hometown, where she was hired as a bank clerk at Denizbank, a large private bank. She soon became a retail banking portfolio manager and began investing the savings of relatives and close friends in Borsa İstanbul, Turkey’s exchange entity. In 2011, the bank transferred Erzan to Istanbul. But it was her appointment to the Florya branch of Denizbank later that year that would change the course of her life. 

The bank lies a stone’s throw from the training grounds of Istanbul’s beloved Galatasaray soccer team. The facility counts over 110,000 square miles of greenery, with four grass pitches, a soccer training school and a hospital. That’s where Erzan crossed paths with Fatih Terim, the team’s former coach, and the rest of Galatasaray.

A former player, Terim is arguably the most famous soccer coach in Turkey’s history. Under this leadership, Galatasaray won the football league eight times and entered the UEFA Cup for the first time, where it defeated Arsenal FC in a penalty shoot-out — and received a hero’s welcome home in Istanbul. In the early 2000s, at the height of his success, Terim moved to Italy, where he coached first Fiorentina then Silvio Berlusconi’s AC Milan. In 2011, more than a decade after winning the UEFA Cup, he came back to Galatasaray and pulled the team out of a long losing-streak. In Grande Terim, a 2022 Netflix mini-series about the lauded coach, one soccer player talks about Terim’s gift for motivating the team, saying: “He can wake up the dead.” For his players, whatever Terim said went.

In 2013, two years after Erzan started managing the Florya branch, Denizbank signed a sponsorship deal with Galatasaray. The salaries of the club’s players and staff would be deposited at the bank’s branch. Erzan also became Terim’s portfolio adviser.

“I remember people saying, ‘Whenever we see Seçil, we see a dollar sign,’” Erzan later said in court. Her main ambition during that time, she said, was to “be a better branch manager and to get promoted.” She devoted her time entirely to Galatasaray: “We served uninterrupted, 7/24. If someone forgot the password of their credit card at midnight and called me, I’d talk to the consumer services as branch manager and fix it.”

The Turkish economy and its banking system were in good shape in those years. Despite signs of his authoritarian streak, the country’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was considered a pro-EU reformist set on restoring his country’s ties with the West, and foreign investment poured into the country. Galatasaray’s success in European tournaments also contributed to the image of a country growing closer to the West.

In court documents, Erzan said she began sending batches of money to Terim through his driver, Umut Akgöze, who deposited the cash in Terim’s account.

Over time, Erzan solidified her status and membership in the exclusive world of Galatasaray. In her court statements, Erzan said she didn’t owe “anyone any money” during those years; she was investing and bringing back considerable returns.

In July 2022 she started dating Candaş Gürol, Terim’s former lawyer (the couple had separated by the beginning of 2023). Erzan says she continued assisting Terim, her longtime client at Denizbank’s Florya branch, at this time and helped him when he ran into financial difficulties, shortly after he resigned from Galatasaray. She claimed in court that a tax had been levied on Terim’s Eurobond account and he lost money in private banking. “This angered him greatly,” Erzan said. She claimed Terim was considering changing his bank when he gave her “$300,000 in cash by hand. ‘Invest this money,’ he told me. He didn’t bring that money to [the] bank or deposited it. ‘Do whatever you like with it,’ he told me.”

In court documents, Erzan said she began sending batches of money to Terim through his driver, Umut Akgöze, who deposited the cash in Terim’s account. Erzan claimed Terim used the money to make his credit payments and pay his debts to various institutions. She also claimed Terim was receiving greater sums than his initial investment, and that he made another payment, of $1 million, to her.

Terim’s lawyer on the case, Tufan Karataş, rejected Erzan’s claims about Terim’s financial difficulties and told The Dial that Terim had never handed Erzan any cash. He noted that Erzan didn’t implicate Terim until after she was in jail and argued that her defense is creating “a narrative of victimhood for her.” 

At that time, in 2022, Erzan and Gürol, her then boyfriend, hosted Terim and his wife Fulya in Erzan’s summer house on Tenedos, a Turkish island in the Aegean Sea. They treated their guests to a luxury restaurant and watched Grande Terim after dinner. At the end of their stay, the couple left Erzan a handwritten note: “Love is the most eternal gift one person can give to another. This weekend, you made us feel that in such a naive way that I find it hard to articulate how much we thank you. I’m so glad our paths crossed.” Gürol, whom The Dial contacted for comment, didn’t dispute this chronology of events. He said he didn’t know anything about Erzan’s actions or her work for Terim.

When the judge asked Erzan what she did with the $300,000 Terim gave her, she responded: “I invested one part of it; the rest I gave it to someone who needed it urgently,” without naming who. (Terim’s lawyer disputed that she was investing Terim’s money and claimed Erzan “was clearing his account.”)

Erzan’s own debts had started to amass in 2021, when Ali Yörük, a businessman she knew from Çorlu, where she served him as a client at Denizbank, brought her 10 million Turkish liras to invest. “He brought that to me in two portions of 5 million liras. I was told that one of those 5 million liras was borrowed from a loan shark,” Erzan told the court. To help Yörük, who came under pressure to pay back what he had borrowed, she took a loan from another loan shark, and paid back what Yörük owed, she said in her court statement.

Yörük’s lawyer told The Dial that Yörük never collected money from a usurer and rejected the claim that Erzan had to find money to help Yörük. Erzan had been collecting money from various businesspeople, and that Yörük was one of her many victims, he said.

By May 2021, Erzan said the loan shark was demanding that she repay the loan she used to help Yörük. In her court statement, she said started “hating money” during this time. Her father had died a month earlier, from complications of COVID-19: “My psychology went downhill.” 

That’s when an opportunity presented itself. In December 2021, as the country faced imminent bankruptcy with the Turkish lira melting against the dollar, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan introduced a financial instrument that converted customers’ savings into Turkish lira to protect them against exchange rate fluctuations — and increase Turkish lira deposits in banks.

“She told me it was guaranteed, ran no risks, and was offered to exclusive customers by the bank under exceptional circumstances.” Kaya could win big if he contributed to this “special fund.”

In his sole interview about the case, Semih Kaya, the former Galatasaray midfielder who found the AirTag in the laptop case, told journalist Nevşin Mengü he had received a call in early 2022 from another banker at Denizbank, who explained to him the advantages of the new system. In that interview, which he gave alongside his lawyer, Kaya said he agreed to transfer his earnings into such a deposit, converting €1.2 million into lira and placing it in the foreign exchange protected account. (The Dial was not able to contact Kaya’s lawyer, Ahmet Kurutluoğlu; he isn’t listed anywhere and does not have a publicly listed physical office. In the interview in which he appeared alongside Kaya, the lawyer said he never talked to the press and had made an exception on this occasion.)

A few weeks later, in April, Erzan invited him to her office and described a “special fund” that was more lucrative, according to Kaya. “She said it was all official and presented documents to me,” Kaya said in the interview. “She told me it was guaranteed, ran no risks, and was offered to exclusive customers by the bank under exceptional circumstances.” Kaya could win big if he contributed to this “special fund.”

Kaya withdrew his money and handed it to Erzan in her office in five installments, according to his statements in court and in his interview about the case. On May 12, 2022, Erzan used $1.4 million she’d received from the football player to pay off her debt to the loan shark. But Erzan had promised Kaya considerable returns. In court, Erzan claimed she received $3.2 million in total from Kaya, and that returns from the fund had allowed him to purchase his €4.2 summer villa and a hybrid Mercedes. She also said he put pressure on her to send more and more money. “Even though I paid him $5.7 million back, I couldn’t free myself from Semih Kaya,” she told the court.

Both in his interview on the case and in his court statements, Kaya denies allegations he put pressure on Erzan. He also denies that Erzan played any role in his purchase of the summer home and the Mercedes. In the interview, Kaya said he had simply trusted Denizbank with his money and was legally enjoying returns of his investment. Kurutluoğlu, Kaya’s lawyer, emphasized in the same interview that Kaya had always handed the money to Erzan in her office at the bank, and had received receipts in return, which he later presented to the prosecutor. He was convinced everything was done by the book, Kurutluoğlu said.

To keep Kaya, Terim, and other investors happy, Erzan enlisted a number other prominent former and current Galatasaray players to invest in the “special fund,” according to her court statement.

Among them was Arda Turan, a former Galatasaray player who had been coached by Terim, who later joined Atlético Madrid. Like Kaya, Turan was preparing to retire from Galatasaray. In his court statement, Turan said he “didn’t much care about [the fund]” at first, but because Erzan “exhausted” him with her phone calls, he ended up giving her $3 million to invest in September 2022, the same month he announced his retirement. Turan’s lawyer confirmed this course of events to The Dial. He added that the soccer player handed over the money to Erzan at Denizbank’s Levent branch, and that Turan was convinced that he was putting his money into a legal deposit account. Erzan had promised Turan “up to 20 percent returns on his capital in four months,” his lawyer said.

The high return actually took place and convinced Turan to find more money. In the weeks that followed, he sold his land and took out a bank loan of about $2 million with the promise of a similar profit. “I fell victim to this temptation,” Turan said in his court statement, admitting he had been “a little naive.”

Erzan described Turan to the court as someone who “helped me a lot.” She claimed she paid him back the money he invested, but “couldn’t pay the extra money that I promised him.” Turan’s lawyer disputed this claim and said Turan had given Erzan $13.9 million in total and lost a considerable sum. 

Erzan also raked in cash from Fernando Muslera, the team’s goalkeeper and captain, and Muslera’s Turkish interpreter, Fırat Özdemir.

By December 2022, Erzan was “completely exhausted,” she said. According to Erzan, Terim had planned to sell his house in Bodrum, on Turkey’s southwestern coast, to make more cash available to the fund. She claimed in court he was struggling to find a buyer. Terim’s lawyer described this as a “fantasy” and told The Dial that Erzan was in fact pressuring Terim to sell his house; “she tried to convince Terim to sell, and she found buyers for the house, but Terim rejected her offer.”

Muslera’s contribution was a lifeline, according to Erzan’s court statement. At first, he handed over $700,000, via his manager; then, a few months later, $500,000, according to Muslera’s court statement.

But Erzan couldn’t pay the enormous returns she had promised Muslera and started visiting his home to reassure him, according to Muslera in a statement to the court. During one visit after the devastating twin earthquakes in February 2023, Muslera claimed Erzan told him “the only reason the payment is delayed is the earthquake.” To other anxious customers who partook in the scheme, Erzan pointed to the war in Ukraine as the reason for the payment delays.

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Erzan was in over her head. According to her court statement, Kaya was exerting considerable pressure on her to generate more cash. (In his interview about the case, Kaya denied her allegations.) To attract new investors, Erzan was making promises of higher and higher returns, which were becoming increasingly hard to keep. Meanwhile, according to her court statement, Erzan had to continue paying Terim — but couldn’t tell him that she had not invested his money and was sending him other people’s investments instead. In her telling, Terim benefitted from the scheme without knowing how it functioned. Yet she insists Terim was aware that he was receiving very high returns.

She also began to reach further outside the Galatasaray social circle — a move that would spell her downfall and lead to her eventual arrest.

Terim’s lawyer told The Dial his client didn’t benefit at all from working with Erzan and that the entire saga was “a case of manipulative hypnosis.” Erzan, he said, “identified the weak points in everyone; convinced them to be silent about the so-called fund, while letting them know that all others were getting money from it.”

According to her court statement, Erzan said she then approached two Galatasaray stars she hadn’t tried before: Emre Çolak and Emre Belözoğlu. Unlike other players who got involved in the scheme earlier, the two late joiners would lose all their money: Çolak sank $3.2 million and Belözoğlu saw $4.2 million vanish. (Çolak and Belözoğlu’s lawyers did not respond to multiple requests to confirm Erzan’s version of events.) She also began to reach further outside the Galatasaray social circle — a move that would spell her downfall and lead to her eventual arrest.

Bülent Çeviker, a prominent businessman, told prosecutors Erzan visited his house in Yeniköy February 2023 to discuss her “special fund.” She had tried to convince him to invest before. But this time she adjusted her pitch, adding a name she knew would make the fund more alluring to potential investors: “She said celebrities like Fatih Terim were investing in it,” Çeviker recalled in his court statement.  

Erzan has since admitted that she took $2.2 million from Çeviker and paid him nothing in return. “I was under great threat by the time I took money from Bülent Çeviker,” she told the prosecutor. Çeviker’s payment was “gone in less than five minutes” as she paid off the people awaiting money from her. “When money came in, it melted in half an hour… whoever could get their hands on it got it,” she said. 

According to the prosecutor’s report, Erzan promised to return the $2.2 million she took from Çevikers as $3 million by April 3, 2023. On April 7, she had stopped answering their calls.

That’s when İnci, Çeviker’s wife, called Denizbank’s Levent branch. Erzan’s deputy, Asiye Öztürk, picked up the call, according to Öztürk’s statement to the court. Çeviker said Erzan had scammed her. “I noted the name and the phone number” and notified the regional manager, Öztürk recalled in her court statement.

Soon after, Istanbul’s public prosecutor received two complaints: the first from Atilla Baltaş, a businessman and longtime Denizbank customer who also took part in the special fund — and who had placed the AirTag in the laptop case in late 2022 when he became suspicious of Erzan’s dealings. The second complaint came several days later, from the Çevikers. Erzan was arrested in her family home in Çorlu the same day. “I can’t think straight since April,” she told the prosecutor in her first statement in November 2023. “I am a very cowardly person.”

Erzan claimed in court that the bank had pressured her to say she had conducted the scheme outside of the bank’s systems. “Protect us and we will protect you,” Erzan claimed Denizbank’s CEO, Hakan Ateş, told her.

In a statement to The Dial, Denizbank’s lawyers disputed these claims, and pointed to Ateş’s own statement to the prosecutor, in which he said he asked Erzan to “just tell the truth, so no one is victimized for this.”

The bank also referred to the transcript of a conversation between Turan and Erzan, which Turan submitted to the court, in which Erzan says: “They aren’t aware of it, and they’ll destroy me when they learn.” This proves the bank administrators’ ignorance of her scheme, the bank said.

A report by Turkey’s Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency has found that there was no evidence showing that the bank embezzled. This means Erzan is on the hook for the losses: when the case concludes, the judge can order her to pay off the claimants, or demand that the bank compensates the losses. Given Erzan’s debt, it’s unclear if she would be able to pay the claimants back. When police searched Erzan’s house, they found a safe that contained 60,000 Turkish lira — less than $2,000. Divide it by the number of complainants, and each receives less than $100.

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The media devoured the Seçil Erzan story, and her photographs with Terim and other Galatasaray celebrities furnished newspapers for days. Editors of three of Turkey’s biggest news portals told the journalist Ertuğrul Özkök that clicks to their news articles had “tripled thanks to the Fatih Terim fund.”

At the heart of the scandal is the question of whether the Galatasaray players and others involved in the scheme are victims or greedy losers.

When I visited the Istanbul Justice Palace, the largest courthouse in Europe, in May to follow Erzan’s court proceedings, media interest seemed to have waned. The hearing on the day of my visit was consigned to a small courtroom. A security guard patrolling the corridor wondered whether the attorneys of all the complainants would be able to fit inside.  

That same week, Galatasaray, now coached by Okan Buruk, another Terim protege, won the national league, in a much-needed boost to its finances and reputation in the wake of Erzan’s arrest. The team now hopes to win in the playoffs, triumph in the UEFA Champions League which kicks off in August, and pocket €50 million in prize money.

At the heart of the scandal is the question of whether the Galatasaray players and others involved in the scheme are victims or greedy losers.

Each “investor” received a document with an identifying number; some received more convincing forgeries after they demanded official documents. (These documents all feature in the prosecutor’s indictment; the soccer players involved confirmed in court that these were the documents they received from Erzan.) Some of the documents resembled official Denizbank bank statements and bore the bank’s logo, while others were poorly attempted forgeries. One document, addressed to Selçuk İnan, another Galatasaray player who contributed to the fund, was written on scrap paper that features the logo of Castrol, a British oil company that markets industrial and automotive lubricants. Scribbled in ballpoint, the document resembles an illegible handwritten medical prescription.

An investigative report compiled by Denizbank in late April 2023 notes that Erzan offered an interest rate of 253 percent to be applied to dollar investments, which she promised would be paid in 46 days. The naïve belief of her investors, the report surmised, was “an act that couldn’t be expected from a person with an average intelligence.”

Lûbe Ayar, a Turkish journalist who has been following the case from its outset, says the scheme ran on the players’ greed. “Both Semih Kaya and Arda Turan surely knew that they were giving their money to receive high interest,” she told me. “Turan’s WhatsApp messages show how he was adding new names to the system … so that their money could come into it.”

In his statement to the prosecutor, Terim has denied taking part in the scheme and claimed that Denizbank’s Florya branch owed him $3 million. He does not currently face any charges, but the judge on the case has ordered Terim to be present as a witness at the next hearing, which is scheduled for September 20.

In November, the former coach issued a statement saying the case had allowed “people suffering from a Fatih Terim complex” to air their hatred for him by “attempting to pull me into a case to which I have no relation.” Terim promised to “launch the largest legal battle of history” against those people. “They should be prepared.”

From Ayar’s perspective, Terim and Galatasaray are exercising damage control after the spectacular failure of a mad, naïve bid to spin cash out of thin air. The players, she points out, never filed a complaint to the bank. “Instead, they pulled one another into the pit to save their own money.”

✺ Published in “Issue 18: Sports” of The Dial