Newsflash: Canadian Bitcoin Exchange ‘Hacked,’ Says All Funds are Gone
Yahoo ^ | October 28, 2018 | P.H. Madore
Posted on 10/29/2018, 7:35:17 AM by lowbridge
A small Bitcoin exchange based in Alberta, Canada, has gone offline. Before their Twitter page went offline, MapleChange had announced on Twitter that they “[had] no more funds to pay anyone back.”
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It’s been some time since we were able to report on a good old-fashioned exit scam. In the crypto space, we have primarily seen them in gambling, the dark web, and exchanges. The recipe is basic: gather trust of some clientele, get all their funds in one place, and run off with the money. It doesn’t actually matter the method by which you run off with the money, whether you claim a hack or simply up and disappear. The less-frequent (today) practice is precisely where the old wisdom of keeping one’s coins off exchanges and the like overnight comes from. You never know what’s going to happen next, and in cryptocurrency, you don’t have anything if you don’t have your own private keys. It’s just the nature of the thing.
Unfortunately, the MapleChange “hack” has all the signs of an exit scam.
For starters, there’s no need for the exchange to delete its social media pages or completely disappear in quite the fashion it has. There is no question that it is in debt to a number of depositors, gratefully a likely small number, but in business such things happen, and that’s what insurance or bankruptcy courts are for.
The short span of time between the announcement of the “bug” and the total disappearance of the exchange or its operators is another signal.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
