On Monday, a total of 126 former customers to the Norwegian crypto exchange Bitcoins Norge filed a police report against the company. The charges in the report are, among other things, disloyalty to principal and accounting offenses.
In addition, the Norwegian economic crime authority Økokrim now confirms that they have launched a preliminary investigation into the crypto exchange and that evidence has been secured through a house search, the Norwegian news site E24 reports.
“I can confirm that Økokrim has launched an investigation into this matter. We conducted a house search and seized assets, computers and documents at several locations in Stavanger yesterday, including at Bitcoins Norge AS”, prosecutor Daniel Sollie told E24.
One person is charged with disloyalty to principal. The person has been questioned and has given his version of what happened, according to the prosecutor.
The platform provider was hacked
It was in early July when Bitcoins Norge announced that they would stop all trading on their platform and that users’ cryptocurrencies should be sold “as fast as it is practically possible”.
The reason stated was that the crypto exchange’s platform provider Alphapoint suffered a hacking attack.
According to the announcement, the hacking attack against Alphapoint happened on May 7, but Bitcoins Norge chose to delay the situation because the company thought they were insured. However, it turned out that only the company itself was insured, not the customers.
Want the difference
The message from Bitcoins Norge this summer was that users will get back the value in cryptocurrencies they had on the exchange on May 7. At that time, the bitcoin price was at $5,939.
The aim of the police report from the 126 people is to get back the difference in the bitcoin price between May 1st and when the news of the hacking attack became known on June 30th. In fact, during that period the price more than doubled.
Million-dollar claims
The total amount of money that the 126 people now require amounts to a total of 13.5 million Norwegian kronor, which is $1,4 million.
However, the law firm Berngaard, which represents affected clients, has calculated an average requirement of 107,000 Norwegian kronor per client.
If you multiply that amount by 25,000, which was the number of customers that Bitcoins Norge was reported to have, the claims on the exchange total a sum of 2.67 billion Norwegian kronor, which amounts to over $290 million, E24 reports.
