It's more or less commonly accepted that its creator got jailed for being an arms dealer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux

I knew the speculation on him being involved in some capacity, but as the wiki page states, this was never confirmed in any substantial way.

More importantly, if development seized with no public comment, that would be one thing and may strengthen the "he got arrested" theory. However, there was some final communication, specific recommendations to rely on Bitlocker of all things, a new version of Truecrypt was released solely for decrypting existing disks and then the web page was removed, including a flag set on robots.txt to ensure it wouldn't appear on archive.org. All this concurrent to a crowd funded source code audit that, in the end, did not find any server issues or backdoors (I recall some speculation back in the day, that either known code quality issues or an intentional backdoor could have caused the exodus).

That all makes it hard to link this to an arrest of the main developer, though I dislike speculation without any hard evidence and if there is no new information, I'll keep this filed under "there is no answer".

I always believed that rather than publicly stating that they were about to be arrested or worse, which may alert regular, non-tech-savy people, he sent a hidden message in the arguably horrendous recommendation of replacing his tool with BitLocker.

I think he was trying to scream “Run!” without actually screaming “run”.

Wasn’t there something with 7.1A and that the canary was gone after that version too?

> He subsequently admitted to arranging or participating in seven murders, carried out as part of an extensive illegal business empire.

Yikes

Makes you wonder what kind of leverage/information you have to have to only get 25 years for admitting to being involved in 7 murders.

According to Wikipedia, the DEA gave him immunity on additional charges in return for pleading guilty and running a sting against his associates, but before the DEA knew about the murders.

My theory is that Le Roux was just financing the (two?) TrueCrypt developers.

One of the greatest men of our times.