OTTAWA (dpa-AFX) - MapleChange, a minor cryptocurrency exchange in Canada, has been shut down after all of its funds of around 913 bitcoins worth $6 million were stolen in a hacking act. The incident occurred on Sunday morning.
In a Twitter announcement, the company said that some people have managed to withdraw all the funds from the exchange due to a bug. It also announced a thorough investigation, but said it cannot refund anything until the investigation is over.
The exchange seems inoperative now and there is no further information from the exchange regarding the issue or whether the lost coins were recovered. It has deleted its social media accounts and website is offline.
The Twitter account of MapleChange had fewer than 2,000 followers, in comparison to 880,000 followers of Binance.
Meanwhile, a new Twitter account, known as @MapleChanged is said to have been created, to provide information to users about the exchange and the latest issue. Some reports claim that the whole issue was an exit scam played by MapleChange, building up reserves of bitcoin before announcing that all were lost.
The news did not make any particular impact on the price of bitcoin. It was trading at $6,425.6, down 0.70 percent over 24 hours, with a marketcap of $111.47 billion, according to coinmarketcap.
The steep increase in the demand and price of bitcoin has resulted in significant number of hacks and thefts of the digital currencies over the years.
Last week, North Korean hacking outfit 'Lazarus' had stolen $571 million worth of cryptocurrency from online exchanges. The state-sponsored hacker is said to be behind 14 attacks carried out on crypto exchanges since January 2017.
A new study has found that criminals have laundered $2.5 billion worth of Bitcoin, 97 percent of which is from unregulated cryptocurrency exchanges or in countries with lax Anti-Money-Laundering or AML regulations.
In 2014, Mt. Gox revealed a theft of almost 750,000 of its customers' bitcoins, and 100,000 of its own Bitcoins, worth around $473 million. The stolen bitcoins accounted for around 7% of all bitcoins at that time.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX