A Spanish court has given the Tenerife police permission to look into the case of an alleged Bittrex customer who claims the crypto exchange is at fault in the case of the “theft” of around USD 62,000 worth of bitcoin (BTC).
The Tenerife branch of the national police cybercrimes unit is now investigating the claim, after the user stated unauthorized access had been granted to his wallet, where he claims he had stored BTC 1.3.
Per La Provincia, the claimant was identified as being a male from Tenerife who stated that in May last year, he created a BTC wallet on the platform, deposited the funds and discovered shortly after that the wallet had been emptied.
The man allegedly contacted the Bittrex support team, who reportedly claimed that the customer had been the victim of cybercrime.
However, the claimant appears to have enlisted a security expert to trace the alleged theft.
This expert’s testimony, the court heard, detailed that “Bittrex had allowed” four suspicious “access attempts” to be made before the theft took place from four different IP addresses in France, Granada, Madrid and a town in Minnesota, in the United States, all using different operating systems, and “all inconsistent with” the customer’s own devices. The expert added that “Bittrex did nothing to prevent” the access attempts.
The alleged raider who finally succeeded in accessing the account then proceeded to inform support staff that they had forgotten their private keys and requested the removal of a security code. Once this had been done, the attacker is said to have successfully transferred the BTC into another unknown wallet.
The fact that the attacker used a different OS than the complainant’s “should have raised red security flags for Bittrex,” particularly as the internet service provider and browser data were all different from the user’s.
The claimant is hopeful of suing the exchange under computer fraud and misappropriation of funds laws, which can be punishable with jail time or fines under local law.
Our has contacted Bittrex for comment.
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