...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.
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The fine was announced in March 2024, and Crypto.com said it had appealed the penalty.
Crypto.com was hardly the first exchange to fall afoul of the regulator: Binance was fined $3.35 million in July 2022 for the same, and Coinbase was hit with a $3.6 million for the same in January 2023. Binance later shut down their Dutch operations after failing to obtain a license.
Prager Metis is among the auditors who audited FTX, and was noted by FTX's CEO-in-bankruptcy John J. Ray III for advertising itself as "the first CPA firm to officially open its headquarters inside the metaverse".
None of the clients involved with the faulty audits were disclosed in the lawsuit, and the SEC has not issued any statements connecting the charges to the FTX collapse.
Three Arrows Capital fell apart in June 2022, and was among one of the first major collapses that set off a domino effect of crypto company failures throughout that summer and the rest of the year.
The change is scheduled to go into effect on October 16.
Police have received more than 2,200 complaints pertaining to the exchange, involving $191 million (and counting) in possible losses. Eleven people, including various crypto influencers who had promoted the exchange, were taken in for questioning. However, police have said those eleven people were not likely central to the fraud, and that the leaders of the JPEX project are on the run.
According to the South China Morning Post, "The alleged case of financial fraud involving HK$1.37 billion is the largest of its kind in Hong Kong's history."
However, a bug on the part of the counterfeiter prevented massive losses. The spoofer used only six decimal places instead of eight, meaning that those who tried to redeem the fake tokens only received $250 instead of $25,000.
Upbit later re-enabled Aptos transactions after patching the bug.
Sun offered a bounty to the hacker to return 95% of the funds, also promising to hire them as a "security white hat advisor" for the exchange. Otherwise, he threatened to go to law enforcement.
Two weeks later, the thief returned the funds, with a note that their hot wallet key had leaked. Huobi paid the $410,000 bounty.
In their announcement, Mixin wrote that "the database of Mixin Network's cloud service provider was attacked by hackers", leading to some confusion as Mixin is supposed to be a decentralized network that ostensibly shouldn't have a centralized cloud database.
Mixin announced they would be suspending deposits and withdrawals pending analysis of the incident. They also told users that they would be compensated "up to a maximum of 50%" on assets that had been stolen from them, and receive "tokenized liability claims" (that is, IOUs) for the rest.
These types of scams draw in tens of millions of dollars each month, and one researcher has estimated around $350 million in Tether have been stolen in these types of scams since September 2021.
This is the second theft from Balancer in a month, after it warned of a critical vulnerability on August 22, and that vulnerability was exploited for around $2 million several days later.
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