Users of Two More Crypto Exchanges Can’t Access Their Funds

A financial regulator in a Canadian province has placed one cryptocurrency exchange into receivership and is investigating another – with scores of customers concerned about the whereabouts of their funds.

Per multiple Canadian media outlets, including news agency The Canadian Press (via Vic News), the British Columbia Securities Commission last week asked the province’s Supreme Court to place the Vancouver-based Einstein Exchange into the regulator’s hands after the latter “received numerous complaints about customers being unable to access their assets.”

The court granted the application on Friday last week, appointing auditing firm Grant Thornton as an interim receiver, with a remit to “protect Einstein Exchange’s assets.” The auditor posted a legal document issued by the court, which specifies that it may make “forced entry into any of [Einstein Exchange’s] business properties.”

The commission says it believes the exchange could be holding some USD 12.4 million worth of customer funds. And the regulator said that Einstein’s lawyer informed it that it was planning to close its doors “within 30 to 60 days ‘due to a lack of profit’” on October 31.

And the commission stated that it had also been contacted by customers of the ezBtc.ca platform, which is headquartered in Nanaimo. The regulator said it had gone public with the news as it feels “customer assets are at risk.”

Both the ezBtc.ca and the Einstein Exchange websites are currently down, and the latter has not posted on social media since October. A disgruntled customer appears to have taken charge of the ezBTC.ca Facebook account, and have been posting allegations of the exchange’s misdoings for several weeks.

ezBtc.ca customers have claimed they have heard nothing from the exchange for months, and say that the platform has not responded to their emails.

This is the second time a Vancouver-based exchange has been put into receivership. Readers will recall the ongoing case of QuadrigaCX, whose CEO died in mysterious circumstances last year, leaving some 115,000 customers out of pocket to the tune of up to USD 200 million.

The commission also remarked that as exchanges are unregulated, financial authorities are unable to provide the same level of protection to investors as they do to the customers of regulated entities.

As many experts have stressed previously, crypto users should keep their private keys to their coins offline, e.g. in hardware wallets such as Ledger, Trezor, KeepKey and others.