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Polish Cryptocurrency Exchange Shuts Down Overnight, Taking Funds With It
"On the blockchain nothing disappears." Users left hunting for clues when Polish exchange abruptly shuts down.
By John Biggs
Updated Sep 13, 2021, 9:17 a.m. Published Jun 8, 2019, 4:00 p.m.
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A polish cryptocurrency exchanged called Coinroom shut down on April 2, 2019, taking multiple customer accounts worth up to $15,000. The site is currently down and there is no way to contact the founders.
"We don't know how much they took," said one user named Maciej. "But it is definitely a lot of cash."
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Polish news site Money.pl first discovered the exit scam on May 31.
"Coinroom registered as a business in 2016 and a year later opened its website. Clients could deposit, buy, and sell cryptocurrencies. They could also exchange cryptocurrency for fiat," wrote Marcin Łukasik on Money.pl. "In April users received an email that told them that their accounts would be closed. They had one day to get their cash out. In order to do this they had to contact the exchange admins directly. Everything was laid out in the terms of service the users signed."
The exchange closed the next day and users who did not follow the proper procedure - one laid out by the exchange itself - lost their assets.
The owners disappeared and the president, Tomasz Zbigniew Wiewióra, was not available to answer questions regarding the exit scam. One Coinroom client found that Wiewióra opened a business in Estonia after leaving Poland. Users also believe that the company ran afoul of the KNF, the Polish economic authority. Łukasik noted that the same thing happened to another exchange, Bitmarket24, resulting in an overnight closure. Coinmarket was under investigation but survived a few months after being entered in to the KNF's black list.
One former user thinks the cash is long gone.
"There are some very interesting indicators that the cryptocurrencies were taken out and moved to other exchanges a few days before the shutdown," he said. "On the blockchain nothing disappears."
Image via Shutterstock.
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