‘I Can’t Sleep’: Investors Trapped in Turkey’s Fund Collapse Taylan Bilgic Two weeks after putting his savings into a high-flying Turkish stock fund on the advice of a relative, Mehmed Kervanci was frantically hitting the sell button on his phone’s trading app. Kervanci, 28 and unemployed, wanted to use the 2.5 million liras ($51,000) to help pay for his upcoming wedding. Instead, he’s one of almost half a million investors caught in the crisis that’s engulfed Turkey’s asset managers and left them wondering if they’ll ever get their money back.

Turkish regulators have announced the liquidation of about $20 billion in stock and money-market funds as part of a probe into long-running Ponzi-like schemes involving illiquid shares. It’s not clear how much of that can be retrieved. While some investors understood that triple-digit percentage returns were unsustainable and jumped off the wagon before the crash, others had little idea what they were getting into.

A total of 455,758 investors were trapped in the more than 130 funds taken into liquidation, the Capital Markets Board said on Wednesday. “When the order to sell wasn’t processed, we panicked,” Kerv.