They sold Bitcoin at $1.4 million and Ethereum at $15,000 each... before closing!

By AtipikNews | Atipik | 21 Jan 2021

Game over for LiveCoin

Just before the festive season, the crypto-market LiveCoin had caused a sensation after huge price manipulations

on Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) prices. While it is still difficult to know if the rumors of hacking are true, one

thing is certain: LiveCoin will end its service for good.

On Christmas Eve, the LiveCoin trading platform briefly saw the price of Ether rise to $15,000 and the price of Bitcoin rise to $1.4 million.

Faced with these "lunar" quotes, LiveCoin has not only stopped trading, but has also frozen any possibility of withdrawal of cryptography by its users.

In a January 16 announcement, the trading platform based in Russia warned its unlucky clients that it would not be able to survive the alleged hacking that led to its price manipulations:

« (...) as we have already reported, our service was attacked in December 2020. The investigation is still ongoing for the time being. Our service has suffered serious technical and financial damage. It is impossible for us to continue our activities under these conditions. That is why we are taking the difficult decision to close the company and to pay the remaining funds to the customers. »

To be partially reimbursed, each client will have until March 17, 2021 (last deadline) to send his request (by e-mail) to the LiveCoin teams. Please note that "no new applications will be accepted" after this date!

"Major losses"... What's left?

In its announcement, LiveCoin explains that, like its customers, its services and teams must "bear major losses", without giving more details on the percentage of loss or the cryptosystems concerned by these losses.

Even if the information is very fragmented, we know a priori that the Cryptos hijacked from LiveCoin are, according to Decrypt: 106 BTC, 380 ETH, 236 BCH, 67 million DOGE and more than 567,000 XRP.

The Ethers would have transited via Uniswap to be transformed into DAI . The XRP tokens would have been sent to the KuCoin crypto-market, where they were quickly frozen.

LiveCoin users were already worried that this was an exit scam, rather than an external hack. However, several elements of the recovery method are not very reassuring either.

First, the ad appeared on a website at "livecoin.news", whereas crypto's stock exchange was previously at "livecoin.net". According to LiveCoin's account, their teams had lost access to the previous domain name, the new address having been given by their only Twitter account.

Another worrying fact: according to initial feedback from customers who have started to follow the refund procedure, this would require a very demanding KYC (identity verification procedure). The prospect of having to transmit so much sensitive personal data obviously did not please them at all.