QUADRIGA INITIATIVE
CRYPTO WATCHDOG & FRAUD RECOVERY PLATFORM
A COMMUNITY-BASED, NOT-FOR-PROFIT
UNKNOWN
JANUARY 2018
CYPRUS
COINSMARKETS
DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS
"CoinsMarkets serves as a platform for individuals interested in buying and selling Bitcoins using an assortment of world currencies." "CoinsMarkets provides an online tool that allows users to freely trade Bitcoins for a number of different currencies worldwide."
"Instant deposit/withdrawal all coin. Deposit will be credited after 10 confirmations. First 1000 members will receive a no fees account for life. Get free coins after sign up. All active members will get free coins give away. 24/7 Support. 99.9% of ticket will be answered in 1 h or less during working hours. All coins (With Pos ability) in your wallet will generate POS coin and automaticly get credited to your account."
"CoinsMarkets is a cryptocurrency exchange from Cyprus." "The Coinsmarkets domain was registered under a fake name that shows an address in the Netherlands. There’s a Bitcointalk topic called “Experiences with CoinsMarkets.com?” and somebody living near that address in the Netherlands went to check it out and there was nothing related to a cryptocurrency exchange at that address. It was just some wealthy residential area."
"Coinsmarkets is a cryptocurrency exchange that has been all but not working since January 5, 2018, with trading and withdrawals disabled. The Coinsmarkets exchange blames their server and database but really what happened?. In late January Coinsmarkets announced on their site that “trading would be enabled in a few hours” but after that, they never replied to a single query."
"All they allow to be withdrawn are worthless coins. In fact many of which aren’t even on CoinMarketCap, and there are around 350 coins listed at Coinsmarkets. It’s been almost three months and basically nothing has changed. Almost no communication. No legit business does that."
"The latest official announcement from coinsmarkets is, “Some coins face failed withdraw those will be processed manually, please hold on”. The news was released on May 15."
CoinsMarkets operated out of Cyprus, with no visibility into their storage and fund backing practices. Ultimately, they ended up going silent and customers could only access a limited number of low-value coins.
HOW COULD THIS HAVE BEEN PREVENTED?
It's likely that customer funds were not stored securely in an offline multi-signature wallet, and may also have been misappropriated by platform operators. This is another one of those exchange operations which could have been easily prevented.
CoinsMarkets.com exit scam : CryptoCurrency (Jun 3)
coinsmarkets- Crypto Exchange Scam revealed - Go MarketWatch (Jun 3)
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Coinsmarkets.com Exit Scam Update | Reviews Boss (Jun 13)
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CoinsMarkets – Reviews, Trading Fees & Cryptos (2021) | Cryptowisser (Jun 13)
Coin Markets Reviews | Read Customer Service Reviews of coin-markets.com (Jun 26)
