China- based cryptocurrency exchange BTER is no longer able to pay back to all its clients, after it has claimed to have been hacked, with more than 1.
1 million Pounds ($1.75 million) of the digital currency missing.The Bitcoins were kept in the company’s “cold wallets,” a way of storing the digital currency offline.The announcement was published when a number of BTER customers paid attention to some elite transactions moving from BTER’s cold wallet to a random wallet address. After their successful attempt, the amount was again transferred to another wallet.There are no details yet on how the BTER’s funds were stolen, but the internet sleuths are on the hunt for the missing bitcoins.
It is possible to trace any transaction or funds indefinitely on the public ledger or “blockchain” because of the way the digital currency works.The exchange is also preparing for the withdrawals; on its Weibo page, the company stated that the first coins that will be available for withdrawals is NXT, counterparty (XCP), and tilecoin (XTC).Even though the company is looking to liquidate the assets including BTER.com domain, to repay customers.
But unfortunately, it is still not sure whether or not the company will be able to pay back the customers.The hack is one of the latest piece of bad press for the digital currency. In the year 2015, Bitcoin got off to a bad start, losing 30 per cent of its value in less than one week. And at the end of 2014, Slovenian exchange BitStamp was hacked, with attackers making off with 3.2 million Pounds ($5 million) in funds.The Hong Kong exchange has also shut down, with at least 5.
2 million ($8.1 million) in investor funds missing. MyCoin loss appears to be a very classic Ponzi scheme, rather than a victim of a hack attack like BitStamp or the infamous Mt. Gox before it.There are also some good news that Coinbase opened the first regulated US exchange on January after a record- breaking VC funding round.
BTER is offering a 720 BTC bounty “for chasing it back”, even though the company did not elaborate on the exact nature of the bounty.Though actually it will be very difficult to recover the funds in that way, as “several blockchain explorers have revealed that the bitcoins have likely already been sent through anonymization services called Bitcoin mixers”. Still, the company claims to have received a lot of useful and important information from its users.BTER also noted that the company keeps monitoring the movement of the stolen fund.
