Cryptocurrency bank scolds customers for trying to withdraw from their accounts, then disappears.

[DetlefK]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocurrency-bank-einstein-exchange-vanished-leaving-customers-in-a-dollar16m-hole?ref=home

Cryptocurrency is not money. It is a hard-to-counterfeit piece of code that is traded online in what is essentially a barter-economy. The value is determined not by a central authority but by the whims of the investors. (The value of a Bitcoin is nowadays somewhere between $5000 and $15,000, depending on when you ask.)

A currency free from the oppressive clutches of government and corporations is nice and dandy, but it turns out that people really like it to store their money somewhere. And so, unregulated online-banks with no oversight spring up and offer to store your money for you.

Three months after trying to withdraw money from a Canadian cryptocurrency bank called Einstein Exchange, Reddit user LezzBeFriendz received a terse message: Stop emailing or we’ll suspend your account.

“As you have been told several times by several of my team members, by constantly emailing in you are further slowing down our processing times and causing further delays in your withdrawals,” read the Oct. 15 message from Einstein Exchange.

“Please stop continuously emailing in, it is adding to our backlog. We will email you with any updates or when your pending withdrawals have been processed. Please be aware that constantly contacting support via chat and email will result in your account being disabled/blocked on our platform.”

...

Cryptocurrency, a form of digital money, works without centralized banks. The system can be a perk and curse. Although cryptocurrency is harder to trace and more volatile than traditional currency (sometimes leading to huge gains for investors), it can also be a pain for everyday investors to buy and trade. To streamline the process, an industry of cryptocurrency trading companies have offered bank-like services, where customers can theoretically deposit and withdraw their digital money.

...

In a Nov. 1 filing, the British Columbia Securities Commission claimed Einstein Exchange suddenly shut down without returning more than $16 million in customers’ money (including nearly five times more U.S. dollars than Canadian, suggesting the exchange was popular stateside). When a BCSC investigator visited the company’s Vancouver headquarters, he discovered the offices on lockdown. None of Einstein Exchanges’s phone numbers were operational, according to the filing.

About a year ago there was this case of a cryptocurrency-bank owner who disappeared on vacation in India. (He supposedly died, but no corpse was ever found.) And now his bank was unable to let customers retrieve money from their bank-accounts, because he had been the only person who knew the codes for authorizing transactions...