I’ve been posting a bit recently about the coinsmarkets.com scam exchange that went offline about 3 weeks ago, including some videos on YouTube etc.
My first video was this:
My second video talked about the high likelihood that we are facing a so-called “exit scam”:
In the past ~12 hours, there has been an update posted on the coinsmarkets.com news section. Because the site is still having downtime issues, I’ve copied it below for you to read for yourself:
“COINSMARKET EXCHANGE UPDATE
First let us explain what is coinsmarkets , we are based on 2 investor , 1 admin , 1 coder , 2 senior support and 4 general support .
In November last year 1 of senior support left the team , It is hard enough to hire a new one , this work is based on a lot of trust , so we still waiting for correct condidat .
Now let’s move to the issue , in December we experienced a lot of new users and huge volume , we were ready for double or even triple volume but in our case it was 10x +. From here all kind of problem start with servers , Now add to that the last senior support remaining have some family issue and was forced to be off most of the time . In addition to all that there was some db corruption issue we faced due to the overload and later hosting issue. So a lot of work to do with a lot of missing stuff.
Please understand that in exchange you can’t just go and hire someone and trust him millions of dollars .
We are sorry for lack of comunication about issue we have thought that people already trust us enough , and we invested 100% of time in restoring the site . Now issue with hosting , hosting complained about a lot of fraud report from users about our service . We find this really hard to explain , it is clear that not even a single coin has moved from our wallets , and once again we are here to stay , We have not even released 10% of our road map , there is a lot of new future to be added in the nearest future.
A week ago we started negoation with new host that can accept similar service , we initiated the move , The Database was fixed yesterday night . Now remain to setup new servers , few fix here and there and service will be restored , We write our news only in coinsmarkets news section , any twitter , chat msg etc is a scam , Again Official Coinsmarkets message are written only in coinsmarkets news section .(edited)”
What Does This Mean?
At this stage, I’m not too sure. I can see that bitcointalk.org and other forums are abuzz with people talking about this latest update. There are two camps of people:
- The first (whom I consider either to be a bit naive, or otherwise paid shills) are those claiming that this singular, poorly-worded update is definitive proof that we all have nothing to worry about, and that coinsmarkets.com is definitely coming back, that anyone who thinks otherwise is a “FUDder” (my least favorite term in the world – having legitimate concerns about a platform or cryptocurrency is not FUD, it’s common sense)
- The second are those – like me – who believe that this is probably a “smoke screen” put up to distract people and put them off the scent, hoping that eventually people will just give up on chasing it. There is still no timeline, no real apology, no images or videos of the devs working hard trying to put everything back together. After all this time, to put out such an amateurish statement with no supporting evidence does not do much to fill me with confidence.
Even if coinsmarkets.com does miraculously come back online, there is no guarantee you’ll be able to get your deposits out.
Firstly, the flood of traffic all trying to do the same thing will almost certainly crash the server again. Secondly, I find it highly unlikely that such a poorly-run exchange is likely to have in storage all the deposits it claims to have. Sure, your wallet balance might show 100,000 ECA – but do they actually have that 100,000 ECA if everyone decides to withdraw at once? Seeing as physical banks with huge amounts of regulation and government support do not have enough money to cover all depositors looking to withdraw at once (if my high school economics class memory serves me right) I see it as being highly likely that the exchange would just fold.
What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments below!
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