It's common knowledge that keeping your funds on an exchange is dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. Today I want to share with you my bad experience with an italian exchange, The Rock Trading, that stole my funds earlier this year.
Preface
The Rock Trading exchange was online since 2011, and I started using it in 2017 when I got interested in crypto. I never had a problem with it, with fast deposits, trading and withdraws. When I started my own crypto company here in Italy, I also created a second business account to exchange crypto for euros to move them to our bank account, since Binance doesn't provide this service for companies, but for private only.
We had a delay of a few days in our withdraw in January, but after contacting the customer support they quickly managed the situation, so we didn't worry too much about that.
As for my personal finances, I didn't keep much on it, but with my bad luck, I transferred some LTC to exchange them for fiat, and during the operation their value crashed, so I placed an order at the higher value to withdraw them when they reached that value again.
Meanwhile, at the beginning of February we asked for another withdraw of our company funds, and it was never fulfilled.
Bad news
On February, 17th, the bad news: an e-mail informed me that the platform was temporarily closed for "liquidity problems" and so the access to our accounts (and funds!) was lost.
In the next days the platform was opened in read-mode only, so that everyone could download their statements and transaction lists, and it was at that point that I was sure that it would never open again.
After a few weeks it was declared bankrupt, and it was stated that their founders used a single wallet for all customers, mixing their company funds and customers funds, and of course they were used for "investments" and who knows for what else.
The site is now offline so people can't even retrieve their information and balances anymore...
What's next
So what are our options now? In October there will be the first court hearing that will try to find out if there are any funds left, and we all (about 34000 people) have time until September to claim our share of those funds. I'm not very confident that we'll see even a part of our coins back, but let's wait and see.
In the end I'm lucky because I only had there a small part of my crypto assets, but some people here in Italy are desperate because they had all their savings there, which is a bad, bad, bad idea.
The concept of "not your keys, not your funds" is always valid, but somehow we need to interact with these services to change crypto to/from fiat, and sometimes, like in my case, bad luck can bring even the most experienced trader to lose money.
