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A small Bitcoin exchange based in Alberta, Canada, has gone offline. To come their Twitter page went offline, MapleChange had announced on Tweet that they “[had] no more funds to pay anyone back.”
In the way of an explanation, the trade had, approximately one hour before deleting its Twitter page, said that a “bug” had chartered “some people” to withdraw all of the funds on the exchange. Educated readers may withdraw a time when Mt. Gox claimed similar problems. The handling of the two cases by their administrators was dramatically unconventional. In the case of Mt. Gox, attempts were made to repair the damage, although they resulted in worse mutilation. They went so far as to near-nakedly manipulate the Bitcoin price in an attempt to reimburse lost customer funds before anyone found out.
The MapleChange Chirp account possessed less than 2,000 followers.
By contrast, Coinbase has remaining 1 million followers on Twitter and lesser-known altcoin exchange C-Cex has not quite 100,000. In short, cryptonaughts are generally highly active on Twitter and the viewership on that stage is a semi-decent way to judge the popularity of a product or service in the space.
Experts, Clients Fear Exit Scam
Source: Twitter
It’s been some however since we were able to report on a good old-fashioned exit scam. In the crypto intermission, we have primarily seen them in gambling, the dark web, and exchanges. The modus operandi is basic: gather trust of some clientele, get all their funds in one take down a peg or two happen, and run off with the money. It doesn’t actually matter the method by which you run off with the on Easy Street, whether you claim a hack or simply up and disappear. The less-frequent (today) exercise is precisely where the old wisdom of keeping one’s coins off exchanges and the like overnight go from. You never know what’s going to happen next, and in cryptocurrency, you don’t demand anything if you don’t have your own private keys. It’s just the nature of the act.
Unfortunately, the MapleChange “hack” has all the signs of an exit scam.
For starters, there’s no stress for the exchange to delete its social media pages or completely disappear in from A to Z the fashion it has. There is no question that it is in debt to a number of depositors, gratefully a plausible small number, but in business such things happen, and that’s what bond or bankruptcy courts are for.
The short span of time between the announcement of the “bug” and the totality disappearance of the exchange or its operators is another signal.
The domain itself, check in at GoDaddy by one “Flavius P,” is suspect. Most professional operations go to some reaches to be above board, especially those that handle other people’s in clover.
The timing of the problems is another significant factor in guessing that this is not a penny-a-liner or a bug at all, but rather an elaborate, premeditated scam. As you can see by MapleChange.com’s recent traffic statistics, they were sundry probably doing more business over the last week than they had in just out times. If they are guilty of fraud, they struck early on a Sunday morning when they no doubt expected most clients to be sound asleep.
This story resolve be updated as new information becomes available. MapleChange representatives are welcome to reach out to CCN with more knowledge.
Images from Shutterstock
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