He bragged about a BAM 6.3 million American investment and a “new crypto era.” Behind the curtain at ACX and ACX+, accounts were frozen over a BAM 3,783 tax debt, inspectors were locked out, and defrauded customers were left chasing a former police officer who still lectures the public on how criminals steal money.

He promised a new crypto era. Customers lost access to their own money.

On August 14, 2026, Republika Srpska’s Securities Commission ordered ACX operator Adria Technology removed from its virtual-currency service-provider register for one year. The commission’s August 14, 2026, decision documenting failures to cooperate with inspectors and financial-compliance violations exposed the gulf between the exchange’s grand promises of security and the reality of its conduct.

The regulatory expulsion came after months of inaccessible accounts, desperate customer complaints, blocked company bank accounts, criminal reports, and a creditor’s successful lawsuit. Yet in Banja Luka, even obtaining a court judgment against the exchange did not mean obtaining payment.

Republika Srpska is one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s two constituent entities, adjoining Croatia and therefore the European Union. The ACX collapse exposes a brazen accountability gap on Europe’s doorstep: a crypto operator can lock customers out of their funds, ignore regulators, evade court process servers, and still walk completely free.

At the center of the scandal stands Branko Petrović: a decorated Police Academy graduate in Banja Luka, a former Interior Ministry officer, a crypto exchange founder peddling fantasies of multimillion-mark foreign investments, an exposed fraudster under prosecutorial investigation, and, most absurdly of all, a recurring media authority on cybersecurity.

His police credentials helped him build trust. The paralyzed institutions of Republika Srpska allowed him to betray it with impunity.

A police badge became part of the sales pitch

The police connection is documented, and Petrović turned it into the cornerstone of his public authority.

In its September 22, 2017, report on the graduation of Banja Luka’s eighteenth Police Academy class, RTRS identified Petrović among the leading cadets. Branko Petrović from Ugljevik and Sanja Tomić from Bijeljina were singled out as the best among 131 graduates entering the Ministry of Interior of Republika Srpska, known as MUP RS.

Petrović told the public broadcaster that being among the top cadets was a great honor. The institution’s stated mission was to produce officers capable of protecting citizens and their property from crime.

His later business biography weaponized that law-enforcement pedigree for commercial credibility. A Jahorina Economic Forum biography reviewed on October 27, 2026, describing Petrović’s police service and ACX career notes that he served in the police force for several years before moving into cloud engineering, digital forensics, and cybersecurity, ultimately founding ACX.

In promotional appearances, Petrović routinely advertised himself as a cybersecurity specialist who worked on international projects and trained law-enforcement agencies and public institutions in investigating high-tech crime and cryptocurrency fraud.

The irony is staggering. A former police officer who built his reputation claiming to teach institutions how to track cybercriminals became the director of a crypto exchange whose own customers could not retrieve their money.

The company behind the vanished access

Behind the slick ACX and ACX+ branding sits a financially gutted legal entity: Adria Technology d.o.o. Banja Luka.

The CompanyWall profile reviewed on October 27, 2026, identifying Adria Technology’s registration, management, and owners lists its establishment date as September 2, 2023, its tax identifier as 4405119460004, and its registration number as 57–01–0435–23. Petrović serves as the company’s director alongside co-owners Nikola Maričić and Ankkom d.o.o.

While Petrović was touring regional conferences posing as a fintech visionary, the company’s financial reality was a disaster. Public financial filings put Adria Technology’s 2025 revenue at just BAM 176,193. BAM is the convertible mark, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s currency.

Against that modest revenue, the company recorded a 2025 loss of approximately BAM 219,500 and negative equity of approximately BAM 89,800, with just five employees and blocked bank accounts.

The brand promised a financial empire. The balance sheet showed a collapsing shell.

How the illusion of millions was sold to the public

Petrović’s media buildup began long before users realized their funds were trapped.

A CAPITAL article published March 18, 2022, promoting Petrović’s Educor platform and MF banka support presented him as a rising young entrepreneur who had secured a BAM 10,000 grant. ACX was then publicly unveiled at a Banja Luka crypto conference on September 22, 2023, and Adria Technology entered the regulator’s virtual-currency register that November.

Then came the headline number designed to dazzle local investors and ordinary citizens alike.

In its June 3, 2024, report announcing a BAM 6.3 million Modulus investment in ACX, CAPITAL promoted a story that an American technology giant was pouring millions into the Banja Luka exchange. The article quoted Modulus CEO Richard Gardner praising ACX’s team and featured Petrović promising capabilities unseen on other domestic platforms.

Petrović promised hundreds of cryptocurrency trading pairs, regional dominance, a cutting-edge trading platform, institutional Fireblocks wallet security, and access to global investors. He explicitly boasted of strict electronic customer verification, transaction monitoring, certified anti-money-laundering personnel, and top-tier information-security standards.

Every single one of those compliance boasts would later be demolished by regulators.

By April 2025, the hype escalated further. Finticipate’s April 30, 2025, speaker promotion presented Petrović as ACX Bank’s founder and an innovator behind ACX Token, even though the company held no banking license and offered zero bank-deposit protection.

By October 2025, Petrović was aggressively pitching company tokenization, token design, white papers, and sales through “ACX+.” He was selling the public an expanding financial future right as the trap was closing on his existing customers’ money.

A press release about BAM 6.3 million was easy to publish. Returning customers’ actual deposits proved another matter entirely.

The money dried up before the website went dark

Petrović later tried to blame the freeze on a technical migration, but the documented timeline destroys that excuse. Customers were being denied their money while the platform was still online.

In Svjetlana Šurlan’s May 15, 2026, Bloomberg Adria investigation into ACX customer lawsuits and criminal-police complaints, Banja Luka company Rocket Science revealed that it had repeatedly demanded payouts starting in December 2025.

Only after threatening legal action did the company extract partial payments in February and March 2026. The remainder of its money never arrived.

Rocket Science’s attorney, Davorin Marinković, confirmed that the company sued Adria Technology on February 11, 2026, pursuing approximately BAM 35,000 by May and petitioning the court to freeze the exchange’s bank funds. Petrović himself was forced to admit that the corporate client had demanded its money while the platform was still operating.

On January 15, 2026, the curtain fell for everyone else. Customers were suddenly locked out of the platform, fed classic stalling stories about “technical upgrades” and “system migration.”

Retail users told Bloomberg that savings of BAM 1,200 to BAM 1,500 were completely inaccessible. Others described a wall of silence, ignored withdrawal requests, and the ultimate absurdity: an exchange asking its own customers to tell support how much money they believed they had in their accounts.

ACX was not merely refusing to pay out funds. It was acting as if it no longer even had a ledger of what it owed.

Defrauded users forced to hunt for their own money

With institutions silent and media outlets looking the other way, victims had to build their own public warning system.

The Crypto.ba thread opened April 29, 2026, documenting customers’ frozen assets and failed attempts to contact ACX reads like a textbook anatomy of a crypto exit scam.

A user named “Djuro” detailed months of locked funds, a dead website, a disconnected phone line, and futile attempts to reach Petrović across multiple channels. On May 5, user “bigmoney77” reported the exact same pattern: occasional stalling emails promising a glorious return, paired with broken promises to pay out fiat currency or transfer crypto to external wallets.

When Djuro physically went to ACX’s Banja Luka offices to demand answers, he was initially fed empty assurances, only to return later and discover that the company had quietly vacated the premises. By May 7, he was filing complaints with the Securities Commission.

The forum record shows that only those who threatened immediate legal action or relentlessly hounded Petrović for months stood a chance of seeing a cent. On May 19, user “BL3CK” reported extracting payment only after serving a formal pre-litigation notice. In Crypto.ba posts dated July 13 and August 6, 2026, describing a negotiated recovery after months of pursuit, Djuro recounted that it took six grueling months of messages, calls, and physical visits to finally force a payout.

Less aggressive users were simply left behind. On July 28, Haris Mustafić reported that his inquiries regarding roughly 350 platform tokens worth around BAM 700 were completely ignored.

In Branko Petrović’s “new era of crypto,” customer withdrawals had been replaced by an endurance test of harassment and legal threats.

Caught lying, Petrović blamed everyone from America to Italy

When Bloomberg Adria finally confronted Petrović in May 2026, his web of deceptions unraveled in real time.

Petrović first lied to reporters, claiming he knew of no lawsuits against the company or its founders. Only after journalists confronted him with the exact details of the Rocket Science lawsuit did he admit the case existed and that a court hearing had already taken place.

To explain why user funds had been held hostage since January, Petrović spun a convoluted global tale. He claimed ACX had lost access to Modulus Global’s source code after the American partner sold its crypto division to an unnamed Australian firm. He blamed an Italian auditor for objecting to investments in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and claimed BitGo had rejected ACX in February 2026, forcing his team to build its own custody system in mid-March to avoid paying alternative providers EUR 60,000 a year.

Crucially, Petrović had never told his trapped customers a single word about losing his technology partner or lacking a custody system during the four months their money was frozen. They were only told after journalists exposed the crisis on May 15.

Even his attempt to prove that ACX was communicating with users blew up in his face. When Petrović sent Bloomberg screenshots of customer support emails as “proof” of responsiveness, reporters noticed that half of the emails had been sent on the exact day Bloomberg’s questions landed in his inbox.

He was manufacturing an alibi while his users stared at a dead website.

The BAM 8 tax payment that exposed the millionaire mirage

Nothing strips away the fraud of ACX’s “multimillion-mark” image quite like the records of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Indirect Taxation Authority.

On April 23, 2026, tax authorities ordered the suspension of all transactions through Adria Technology’s bank accounts over an unpaid tax debt of just BAM 3,783. The blockade took effect on April 24.

On May 14, Petrović brushed off the blockade to reporters, claiming the tax debt would be paid “in the coming days.” He also insisted that blocked bank accounts did not stop him from returning users’ assets because customer funds were held in cryptocurrency, not fiat currency.

That excuse exposed the core lie of the entire operation: if the cryptocurrency was sitting safely in wallets outside the blocked bank accounts, why wasn’t Petrović returning it to the owners?

Even worse was what happened to the tax bill. By July 7, Central Bank records showed Adria Technology’s accounts were still blocked. By August 21, the tax authority confirmed the debt, including interest, stood at BAM 3,775.

In four months, the total net reduction of the original tax balance was BAM 8.

The man who went on television and business portals bragging about a BAM 6.3 million American investment could not or would not pay a BAM 3,783 tax debt, reducing it by just eight marks across an entire summer.

The phantom “beta” relaunch that couldn’t pay out a mark

With regulators breathing down his neck and bank accounts frozen, Petrović kept buying time by promising a grand comeback under the ACX+ banner.

Bloomberg Adria’s May 27, 2026, report on ACX’s proposed relaunch during regulatory supervision and blocked accounts documented how the company quietly scrubbed its newer domain and reverted to its old web address, promising a full relaunch on June 23.

Ivana Raonić’s May 28, 2026, Bloomberg Adria newsletter on ACX’s announced return captured the sheer audacity of Petrović’s marketing: even with accounts blocked and police complaints filed, ACX was proclaiming that “a new era of crypto trading” was arriving in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

June 23 came and went with nothing.

On July 6, ACX announced a “beta version.” It was a Potemkin village. Some users logged in only to find wiped-out, empty balances; others could not log in at all. More importantly, ACX informed users that bank deposits and withdrawals would remain disabled throughout July, pushing the promise of normal operations to August.

Putting up a login screen where victims could look at frozen numbers was not a relaunch. It was a stalling tactic.

Hiding from the court and the police in the middle of Banja Luka

While Petrović was playing software developer with his “beta” platform, the courts were ruling against him, and he was actively evading the law.

Bloomberg Adria’s July 4, 2026, newsletter on the implications of ACX’s first reported judgment and Šurlan’s July 8, 2026, investigation into Rocket Science’s successful case and ACX’s restricted beta relaunch laid bare the company’s courtroom defeat.

On June 15, 2026, Banja Luka’s District Commercial Court issued a default judgment against Adria Technology after Petrović’s company didn’t even bother to respond to Rocket Science’s lawsuit. The court ordered Adria Technology to pay USD 26,000 in convertible mark equivalent, plus interest dating back to November 2025 and legal costs, within 30 days.

What happened next shows utter contempt for the legal system.

By August, repeated official attempts to serve the court judgment on Adria Technology had failed, including an attempt carried out with the assistance of MUP RS police officers. On August 21, the defrauded creditor was forced to beg the court to post the judgment on the courthouse notice board because Petrović’s company could not be reached.

How does a former top MUP RS cadet, who gives public interviews to Banja Luka journalists and walks freely around the city, suddenly become a ghost whom the court and his former police colleagues cannot locate to serve a USD 26,000 judgment?

Locked doors, uncollected mail, and a revoked license

He tried the exact same disappearing act with financial regulators, and it finally cost ACX its legal existence.

On August 14, 2026, the Securities Commission of Republika Srpska issued its decision kicking Adria Technology out of the virtual-currency register. The commission’s August 14, 2026, meeting record specifying the duration of the exclusion confirmed the one-year ban, which followed the commission’s May 27, 2026, public notice explaining virtual-currency registration and anti-money-laundering supervision.

The regulator’s findings read like an indictment of a rogue operation. When inspectors tried to conduct supervision, Adria Technology obstructed them at every turn: failing to grant unobstructed access to company premises, withholding required documentation, failing to ensure the presence of authorized personnel, and refusing to grant inspectors access to the trading application itself.

Furthermore, the company had failed to conduct mandatory risk assessments for 2024 and 2025 and violated anti-money-laundering laws by failing to properly verify customer identities, business relationships, residences, and the origin of funds. Every compliance standard Petrović had bragged about in the media was a lie.

When the commission mailed its supervision report on July 13, Adria Technology simply refused to pick up the mail. The regulator had to send electronic copies on July 23, July 24, and July 28.

Bloomberg Adria’s August 28, 2026, report on ACX’s exclusion and statutory violations confirmed that stripping Adria Technology from the register made it completely illegal for ACX to operate.

One final lie on the way out the door

Even after being banned by the regulator on August 14, Petrović tried to deceive the public one last time about why ACX was shutting down.

On August 26, twelve days after the Securities Commission had already ordered his company removed from the register, Petrović posted a shutdown notice claiming that ACX had voluntarily submitted a request for deregistration that very day and was shutting down of its own accord.

It was a blatant fabrication of the timeline: you cannot quit a register two weeks after you have already been thrown out of it for breaking the law.

In the ACX shutdown statement carrying an August 25, 2026, dateline and reviewed on October 27, 2026, Petrović had the audacity to play the victim. He blamed “inadequate regulation,” high development costs, and “certain interest groups connected to media in BiH,” whining that media reporting had triggered a wave of customers demanding their money back.

To a conman, journalists exposing frozen accounts and victims asking for their own savings back are a hostile conspiracy.

The statement claimed that 821 out of 902 users had been paid off and promised that everyone else would be settled by a “planned” deadline of October 1.

Predictably, that deadline was just another lie. In Crypto.ba posts dated September 23 and October 1, 2026, recording missed callbacks and the planned repayment deadline, defrauded users documented that promised 48-hour callbacks never happened and their money had still not been returned as October arrived.

CAPITAL’s disgrace: rehabilitating a crypto fraudster as a “cybersecurity expert”

While Bloomberg Adria (alongside brief pickups by BL Portal on May 15, 2026, regarding user lawsuits and on July 8, 2026, regarding Adria Technology’s court defeat) was documenting Petrović’s collapse, the rest of the media scene in Republika Srpska maintained a deafening silence.

Worse than silence, however, was active image laundering by one of the region’s best-known independent business portals: CAPITAL.ba.

Giving Petrović a microphone in a November 6, 2025, CAPITAL TV podcast report presenting him as a cybersecurity and digital-forensics expert was bad enough in hindsight. What CAPITAL did on July 31, 2026, is an unforgivable journalistic disgrace.

In Andrijana Pisarević’s July 31, 2026, CAPITAL report on hackers taking more than BAM 500,000 from Republika Srpska retail chains, the outlet once again featured Branko Petrović as a respected “cybersecurity and digital-forensics expert.”

Look at the calendar. By July 31, 2026, Petrović’s ACX exchange had been holding customer funds hostage for over six months. His company’s bank accounts had been blocked by tax authorities for three months. Criminal complaints had already been sent to prosecutors. And just three weeks earlier, the Banja Luka court judgment ordering his company to pay USD 26,000 to a defrauded client had been publicly reported.

Yet CAPITAL called Branko Petrović to lecture the public on how criminals abuse trust, manipulate payment instructions, and steal money from businesses.

Not a single word in CAPITAL’s article mentioned that their featured “expert” was the director of ACX, a man actively hiding from court servers and locking citizens out of their money. Instead of investigating a massive financial scandal in its own backyard, an independent outlet handed the perpetrator a megaphone to polish his credibility.

Why is Branko Petrović still walking free?

The paper trail of lawlessness is now sitting on the desks of police and prosecutors.

In Bloomberg Adria’s August 27, 2026, investigation into prosecutorial cases, failed judgment service, and ACX’s closure, MUP RS confirmed that criminal-police officers submitted a formal report regarding ACX to the District Public Prosecutor’s Office in Banja Luka on May 28, followed by a supplemental report on July 2.

The Securities Commission also forwarded victim complaints to both MUP RS and the Financial Intelligence Department of the State Investigation and Protection Agency, SIPA. The Banja Luka Prosecutor’s Office confirmed that it received three separate reports regarding Adria Technology, formed criminal files, and opened investigations.

When confronted with the prosecutorial investigation in August, Petrović arrogantly remarked that opening a file does not mean a crime was committed, and boasted that police assisting with court judgment delivery is not a criminal sanction. He brazenly refused to answer why neither the court nor the police could find him to hand him that judgment.

And that brings us to the question that every defrauded citizen and every honest observer in Bosnia and Herzegovina is asking today: Why is Branko Petrović still a free man?

How does an individual take money and cryptocurrency from hundreds of citizens, lock the doors of his exchange in January, ignore tax blocks for months, lock out state financial inspectors, refuse to collect official mail, evade court enforcement with police assistance, get banned by the regulator for breaking the law, miss his own October 1 repayment deadline, and still stroll untouched through Banja Luka in late October 2026?

Where did the customers’ cryptocurrency and money actually go during the nine months their accounts were frozen? Which wallets did Petrović control, and whose pockets did those assets line while Adria Technology claimed to be broke over a BAM 3,783 tax bill?

Most importantly, who inside the police and judicial apparatus of Republika Srpska is shielding a former star cadet of the Banja Luka Police Academy from handcuffs?

When an ordinary citizen owes a fraction of that money, enforcement is swift and ruthless. When an insider with a police pedigree and media friends runs a crypto trap in Banja Luka, prosecutors spend months “conducting investigations” while the perpetrator goes on portals to give advice on cybercrime.

A shutdown notice on a dead website does not erase a robbery. Customers were never asking Branko Petrović for a new financial era. They are asking for their stolen money back, and for the prosecutors to finally do their job.