Bitcoin Forum

Any other lawyers or individuals interested in undertaking a legal action against to try an seek redress for you BTC-e losses or otherwise, post here.

I am suggesting an ETH ICO to fund this.

I want to get involved but I am not a lawyer or anything. I am just a victim.

Undertaking legal action ... against the US authorities? Good luck. An ETH ICO could actually potentially provide a lot of funding (given how people will still throw ridiculous amounts of money into any ICO at this point). But taking on the feds?

This, unfortunately, isn't like offering online gambling from Antigua. Money laundering is apparently taken much more seriously, and given that BTC-E had no mandatory KYC, they probably shouldn't have openly accepted US residents. Pigs, man. :-\

WellI am no US citizen and they are still taking my money??

This is how the DOJ/FBI/etc rolls. They don't care if you are a US citizen or not -- they will steal from you either way. There were many US residents trading on BTC-E -- this is the main justification for why they think they can shut down the exchange like this. But the US customers losing money right now won't get shit back either. The press release from the authorities basically calls all the customers criminals ... I'm scared to even try to get in line to ask for repayment.

Doesn't even sound like they were able to seize funds, anyway. This was an embarrassing episode for US law enforcement, being unable to seize any funds or nab the real owners. But still, it seems we will lose everything anyway. :-\

we can still SUE the US gov for acting in away that has caused us Loss,. I know how hard this is, but still its worth  shot. Eg if the police smash your house down to get at a bad guy, they can pay for it.

I am sure they will have some sort of legislation that says no we don't have to pay, but it may depend on other options.

In principal, you are right. But I just don't see a great chance of success there. Those of us who have sustained big losses from this -- we need to start rebuilding now. I don't have capital to put into any legal battles. I need to rebuild my trading capital and get my life back on track after these losses.

As much as I would love to fight the US authorities, I think it will probably be a waste of money (and for US citizens, it might bring some unwanted attention). I suspect that this is the reality for a lot of BTC-E's customers.

Ok though about this a bit, what we can do, and it will be relatively inexpensive, is an injunction against any auctions by the US govt on the grounds that a portion of those coins are not theirs.

This will I think, force the govt to negotiate a percentage of any seized funds as returnable to the proper owners. Also it may force them to release any data, or at least release for in confidence, to establish what is exactly their. either way we can probably keep the money/coins tied up for a while.

This is probably the simplest way.

I don't think it will be expensive. We can make an agreement with lawyer(s) that they keep a percent of winnings and they will work for little to no cost. Any lawyer who wins this case will probably be well off for life.
Also US government may not even need to have seized the coins to be sued. They can be sued for damages.

Yes the damages angle is a good idea, but will need to establish members of the class, and quantum....that could be hard.

I think it could be potentially hard, due to jurisdictional issues, and legislation that make them immune from prosecution for various acts .... I am sure there will be some of these around that they would try and rely on.

other options maybe

federal tort claims act , but note defenses and in the alternative

Intentional Torts Exception eg interference with contractual rights

may have some legs.

Good Morning,
I can not also see any hope of going into great judicial battles to bring any return. Perhaps for big investors, it's better to rule that no one leaves all their btc in a single exchange so many of those have already settled on the loss and are trying to recover it in another exchange.

maybe but as  crytpto community this has to be done to make federal agencies stop being cowboys, and causing legitimate business and trading problems.

Sure go for the drug money etc, but leave my coins alone, or put processes in place to do your busts right, or face the consequences at court.

This will also help legitimize cryptos who's image is continually tarnished by govt action.

did see the swager of the FBI guy....they need to be taken down by the Courts.

It's called rule of law and private property.

Something the US gov cares little about, except when it is theirs.

true true, and they have deep pockets, that said at least where I am the courts particularly superior courts often hate gov and citizen equally, well maybe not hate, but pretty much insist on due process and generally treat both equally and are not fond of governments kicking doors in on people just doing legit business.

They know executive gov is always trying to expand its reach, including against the court and needs to be held in check.

I am not sure I follow how an ICO would make sense to handle this.

In order to sue someone, you need to have standing, and you can only sue for actual damages (plus punitive damages). So someone who lost (had damages) $1000 in their btc-e account would be able to sue for $1000, potentially plus legal costs/fees and punitive damages.

Someone who invested in an ICO would not be able to recover anything simply because they are token holders of something unrelated to the ICO. Unless you are suggesting that the proceeds of the ICO would be used to purchase btc-e debt at a discount, however this would be difficult because afaik, there is no way to even begin to verify debt claims without access to the btc-e DB.

Even with access to the database, this would be very difficult. Over one million accounts and no required verification. I wonder what percentage of the accounts have anything associated with them besides username, email, password, IP logs.

Fair enough, who the hell wants to send BTC-e their documents? But I guess that's why we're in this mess... :-\

Yes, it would be very messy for as long as the btc-e website is offline/down. In theory, the US government could bring the DB back online and allow users to transfer assets among each-other for the purpose of assigning debts.

Another issue is the fact that the US government does not appear to be holding any of btc-e's crypto assets. The btc-e hot wallet still contains around 400 BTC, and does not appear to have been drained. If the US government did not seize financial assets of btc-e that ultimately belonged to their customers, then their customers would probably not have a claim against the US government just because they forcibly caused btc-e to be shut down.

That's the strange thing about this. It seems like the US authorities probably thought they were raiding BTC-e's main servers, including at least hot wallets. At this point, since they haven't announced any funds seized (pretty embarrassing press release really), I'm guessing the servers they seized were just pointing to remote servers.

The ETH wallet was moved today..... but we have no idea who moved it. Maybe it was the owners, maybe it was the US government, maybe it was just a dead man's switch.

In any case, the overall situation doesn't look good at all for the exchange's customers.....

I am a paralegal at a local solo practicing law firm. I believe there may some administrative action that can be taken. There is one in place, as far as I know, for Border Patrol/Customs (CBP) when property is seized at the border or at checkpoints. If not, then the following questions I have are as follows:

• What's the cause of action?
• Do we file as a collective, and if so, in what federal district court?
• If we don't file as a collective, does each plaintiff file their own petition with a district court of the circuit they're in?

Also, is the federal government in possession of our coins, or merely the BTC-e.com domain? The BTC-e.nz domain doesn't seem to be seized. Further, if the coins are seized by the feds, should we file an app. for TRO to prevent any movement of the money?

Feel free to inbox me. If you feel that there is a viable claim here, I will research it further. LexisNexis always has good stuff in my opinion.

Well, i think the problem is that the US government has never shown much support for victims when they shut down a site that has been accused of supporting money laundering activities. A recent example would be LibertyReserve, obviously it was seized by them and i thought that they should have at least compensated for user losses, but no, nobody was refunded.

BTC-e is essentially Libertyreserve v2.0 with inbuilt exchange.

I mean, taking legal action is worth a try but anyone interseted should keep in mind that the fees can add up if you lose, and plus even if you win it might not be worth your energy.

They are indeed treating BTC-E like Libertyreserve, which does not bode well for its customers at all. The fact that they called the userbase "criminals" basically said it all. Frankly the way the US authorities framed the indictment, I'd be afraid to even pursue any action, for fear that they'll start investigating me....

Even if you are innocent, you don't want the Feds looking into you. They can ruin your life just for looking at them funny.

The ETH that was moved is likely to be cold storage based on the fact that it was worth in the high 8 figures of USD. I don't think they would have any kind of 'dead man's switch' for cold storage, as in theory this would go untouched for long periods of time. It doesn't appear that the BTC hot wallets have been seized/moved as of the time of this post.

Based on all of the above facts, I think the ETH movement is the result of actions of the owners of btc-e. It is standard practice for financial institutions to change the combination of safes/vaults when an employee with access to a portion of the combination stops working at said financial institution, so it would not be unreasonable for the btc-e operators to generate a new cold storage setup/keys and move crypto into the new cold storage. I would say there is a good chance that the Alex guy likely had at least partial access to crypto held in cold storage.

LOL. standard practice for financial institutions  .   are you serious about that?   is BTC-e a  financial institutions?  ;D ;D ;D

Please go to a real forex company see what it means a  financial institution.

FXOpen, AvaTrade and others used BTC-e as a liquidity provider. I think Plus500 did as well because their CFD was based on BTC-e's price. Would you consider these to be real forex companies? Do you think they were stupid (or criminals, as the DOJ alleges) for having exposure to BTC-e?

i feel sorry for those with funds on btc-e. glad i stopped trading there in 2013. i thought it was a legit exchange so i was lucky i didnt find a reason to trade there anmore this year

Legalities aside, an ICO wouldn't work because the creditors are owed money based on how much they hold at btc-e not how much they invest in this theoretical ICO.

What is going to happen is someone is likely going to launch a class action lawsuit and some lawyer is going to take it up on a no win no fee basis and all anyone will have to do is sign up with their details.

ICOSCHMICO

https://www.selachii.co.uk/Blog/Btc-e-com.html Does anyone have more info about that firm?

If you lost money like me on BTC-e, legal action is ongoing to take our money back:

Sign the petition: https://www.change.org/p/department-of-justice-we-want-our-money-back-from-btc-e

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but a change.org petition isn't going to do anything. There is a pretty negligible chance that BTC-e could relaunch in some capacity and people might be able to get some portion of funds out, but that's pretty unlikely given all the heat on them from the FBI, etc. I'd love to see them back in business, but operating in a cat-and-mouse game with the Feds? They'd need balls of steel to come back under that kind of heat.

the people are dreaming. it's AMAZING. :)

they believe that BTC-e will come back online and they will say "hey, take your funds back" instead of withdrawing all their funds and live 100 years in luxury.  LOL

Has anyone got any response from Selachii? I've sent them email, but I haven't heard anything back from them.

https://www.selachii.co.uk/Blog/Btc-e-com.html

That's pretty much a common form of not willing to acknowledge your losses ~ the same is basically happening with people having invested in a certain coin, where later the price tanks real hard.

People will be like, this coin will go back up in value, it can't fail, and the list goes on. It's a human mechanism that prevents them from going completely nuts over their losses ~ let them in their value.

You jump on everything you mostly have nothing to do with, and act like you know it all ~ some of your points are valid, I can't deny that, but it's pointless to constantly jump in people's face because they hope for the best.

We must take PHYSICAL action, not legal.
We must go there and make them restore the site so that we can withdraw.

They do these things to us mostly because we don't take action.
Don't you see that the more the people is becoming submissive compared to the past ( like the 70s), and the more they fool us ?

I am sure we are many and they can not defend against us. Police is weaker than it seems from the news or CSI tv series, trust me.

The first step to do is : start counting how many we are.
So that you realize that we are an army compared to those freaks

Everyone of you that is losing funds and wants to go there together and get them back,  write +1.


+1

+1 on this although i just traded a little amount from BTC-e and not losing money from it but it is a precautionary measure on other online trading site for cryptocurrency lets be vigilant because some others will follow what BtC-e did to their clients.it might happen to other trading site too. so let's build an army to protect against scams of any online trading site.

Yeah it looks like it is becoming a trend for trading sites to pretend to "be hacked" or "seized"... we must teach them that the next time they're gonna pay with their blood.

Even if they got seized for real, they can't tell us the lie that the FBI got the money, because it's impossible. All wallets are encrypted , and also  backupped on local storage, and the FBI does not know the password.

We must make them realize that these jokes are risky for them, not just fun

There would be no dumb person that would surrender all the money that they hold and you are right these things are mostly alibis on which they do redirect the issue on other things that claiming that they have been seized or hack but in reality there are just keeping the money all by themselves. Government cant really sieze those funds if they would like too since it cant really be access easily without they keys or password and they are not dumb enough to give it easily.

I was just stating on one of the other threads, at this website appear to be preparing for this ahead of time. First of all, I'm one of the other forms they were asking some legal questions. Secondly, the legal structure behind their website and business model, is completely different from, cert Florida based businesses that we don't have to mention the name of from a couple years back. I would say that the legal action has been taken care of ahead of time, and they're make sure that there is nothing that anyone can do.

I've posted earlier in my topic, that i can do a job of coummunication leader/courier if you donate me for tickets, accomodation and food. I can meet with collect all the documents, pass it to the lawyers and keep you up to date. I'm a freelancer and i have a time to help you, my english language skills is not perfect for sure, so if you want to delegate me the privileges to represent your interests - PM me, i'm ready to discuss this

Update from btc-e admin (my own translation):
"Update4!

Current information:

1. We have access to our database and wallets, at the moment we are checking our data, cryptocurrency balances, this information will be published till next week end.
2. We confirm that our main financial flows were associated with Mayzus Financial Services Ltd and at the moment this money are seized/arrested.

With respect, btc-e support"

It will the the ultimate indictment of the current banking and legal system where the so called "criminals" give the coins back after they are raided by so called "good people".

indeed. the FBI robbing honest traders and miners to fill their own coffers, and the "criminal" exchange repaying what obligations they can. i don't want to get my hopes up, but this would truly show the immorality of the US authorities' actions. by calling the exchange's traders criminals, they mean to put the burden of proof for innocence (and therefore claim to funds) on traders. that's impossible if coins were ever sent from any other 3rd party services, or p2p transactions outside of the banking/regulated exchange system.