Nano vs. BitGrail. A hack or a scam?
The BitGrail saga continues. Last week week the Italian cryptocurrency exchange claimed it fell victim to a hack and lost a lousy 17 million Nano (The Coin Formerly Known as RaiBlocks). At the time of the alleged hack this pile of Nano equaled a total worth of roughly 195 million dollar. And it didn’t take long before word was on the street that things looked a tad bit too fishy on the Italian exchange’s end. Allegedly BitGrail founder Francesco ‘The Bomber’ Firano had something to do with “unauthorised transactions” that made millions of Nano end up in a pocket where they don’t belong. The out of the blue announcement in early January to halt all withdrawals and deposits of Nano and several other coins already raised suspicion. And The Bomber’s hastily removed Twitter profile in which he showed himself an admirer of scamming didn’t help as well. Even in early January on Telegram several BitGrail users complained about their accounts showing a negative balance. In response BitGrail bluntly shut down their Telegram account, leaving users behind in disarray. Wondering if their deep red balance was caused by a hack or a bug. It triggered the rumour that BitGrail had been insolvent for months and locked withdrawals to buy time. And eventually the disappearance of millions of Nano. A classic exit scam or not, for BitGrail users it looks sour. Untill now the exchange suspended all withdrawals and deposits.
Nano vs. The Bomber
If the disappearance of 17 million Nano alone wasn’t unfortunate enough, some injury was added to insult in the wake of the hack announcement. The Bomber took to Twitter to throw some dirt at the Nano team, after the Nano crew threw some well aimed punches by denying all responsibility. In a Medium-post the Nano core team exposed how The Bomber suggested to make the whole cluster fuck go away by modifying the ledger “in order to cover his losses — which is not possible, nor is it a direction we would ever pursue.” That was for starters, later in the Medium-article the main course was served up: “We now have sufficient reason to believe that Firano has been misleading the Nano Core Team and the community regarding the solvency of the BitGrail exchange for a significant period of time.” On the nose Bomberino. Who also became subject of some good old online mudslinging. When you touch people’s wallet it doesn’t take long before you find your home address (no link here says our lawyer) and picture published.
The Mercatox connection
Members of the Reddit community went on to dig deeper, resulting in an endless stream of baked and half baked allegations. Of suspicious transactions from BitGrail to Nano-trading exchange Mercatox that appeared on the chain. A possible explanation is that BitGrail used Mercatox as an exit route, because cashing out millions of Nano from their own platform would be way too obvious. A theory that inspired a fellow Reddit Sherlock to look further into the BitGrail and Mercatox transaction. After some hours of crawling through transactions well spend, he came across another peculiarity. Not only were substantial amounts of Nano wired from BitGrail to Mercatox: “Bitgrail AND Mercatox were BOTH SENDING MILLIONS of NANO to the SAME addresses…at the SAME time…..“. Which raises a mind boggling question that hopefully will be answered in the near future. Caption loving Sherlock: “Why were MILLIONS worth NANO being sent from Mercatox AND Bitgrail to the SAME addresses at the SAME time while withdrawals were either frozen or closed by both exchanges?” If future research confirms these claims are true, the affair definitely smells like a coordinated action between these two exchanges. Far fetched? Not as long as Mercatox is trying to hide themselves. Keeping quiet on Twitter since the 19th of January, while being in the middle of a shit storm, only make it looks shadier.
Let’s hope that The Bomber has a bit of Binace blood streaming through his vains and deals with this chaos accordingly. But to be honest, when something looks like a scam and sounds like a scam, even screams on top of it’s longs ‘he hello guys, I’m a scam’. It is usually.. very very bad.
Follow our cryptocurrency news updates on www.cryptonewsbulls.com
