Livecoin, a Russia-based crypto exchange, has announced that it will be shutting down operations and refunding its customers after it was allegedly hacked in December last year. Details of the hack are unconfirmed and no post-mortem report for it exists at present time, but Livecoin has proceeded to announce its impending closure, and also to warn its customers about fake accounts or impersonated Livecoin staff in the process of refunds.
“Investigation is in active phase right now. Our service has been damaged hard in technical and financial way(s). There is no way to continue operative business in these conditions, so we take a hard decision to close the business and (will be) paying the remaining funds to clients,” the announcement on the site reads.
On December 24, the Livecoin team stated that the exchange’s servers were under a “carefully planned attack”. It was later found that the exchange lost 106 BTC, 380 ETH, 236 BCH, 567,012 XRP, 66.8 million DOGE, USDT and other ERC-20 tokens, some of which have been liquidated on Uniswap.
Customers have been urged to send their details and requests to an identified email address by March 17 to claim their refunds, but those who have tried to contact Livecoin as instructed found that the email address is not a functional one. This is problematic, considering that Livecoin is also asking for personal data verification such as proof of residential address, government identification documents and more. The actual identities of Livecoin’s team and its founders are unknown.
As suspicion grows around the exchange and its actions, users are even more unwilling to divulge sensitive information without clear reports on what went down during the hack.
