Another day, another crypto exchange bites the dust (or rather, gets its users’ funds embezzled). ezBtc and founder David Smillie are just the latest additions to the long list of scammers who’ve taken advantage of gullible investors looking for a quick buck in cryptocurrency. And what did they do with all that lovely Bitcoin? Gambled it away, because why not? It’s not like any real value or utility was ever attached to those numbers on their computers.
The irony is rich: ezBtc claimed to store users’ funds in cold storage (which sounds impressively secure), but really just used them for personal gain. Because what could possibly go wrong with a platform that promises ultra-security and then promptly uses customer money to fund the founder’s poker habit? It’s not like this has happened before or will happen again anytime soon.
Meanwhile, Canadians are wisely sticking to cash and cards (and e-transfer) instead of jumping on the crypto bandwagon. Who can blame them? The whole cryptocurrency industry is a mess of scams, hacks, and reckless speculation. And yet still people insist on throwing their money at it in hopes of striking gold. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
The BCSC panel has rightly identified Smillie’s deceit as the root cause of this fiasco (and probably many others). But what about all those other crypto exchanges and platforms that are just waiting to do the same? Will they be next? Only time will tell, but one thing is certain: until regulators get serious about policing these crooks, cryptocurrency adoption will remain stagnant.
Source: cointelegraph
The Canadian cryptocurrency trading platform ezBtc and its founder, David Smillie, defrauded customers by misappropriating approximately 13 million Canadian dollars ($9.5 million) of their cryptocurrency investments and using the funds for gambling. A panel set by the British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC), a provincial regulator in Canada, found that ezBt misappropriated customer funds “for their own purposes.” The ezBtc platform, which went offline permanently in or around September 2019 and […]
