Bitcoin Forum

Is one of the centralized exchanges in trouble again? CEO is arrested because he was embezzling $50M worth of money but can it go down like because users and partners would panic and withdraw their funds and partnerships? Are they solvent enough for that? Or is the owner just going to be voted out from the CEO position as he has only 34.2% stake in it and everything goes on like nothing happened?

What do you think?

Source:
https://cryptoslate.com/south-korean-authority-arrests-bithumb-owner-over-50-million-embezzlement-charges/

Some other news says that he's arrested because of price manipulation. So, as of this moment, there are many root cause for his arrest. This is becoming of a trend that big people in the market including the owners of exchanges are becoming involved with such fund from their depositors.

Regardless of the reason of the arrest, this teaches only one thing.

"Never store your funds in exchanges."

Too bad for that exchange to have a greedy people behind it, to be more safe better to get out of that exchange right now and save your money from getting freeze. There’s a lot of FUD and rumors already about this and that is your biggest reason not to trust this site anymore. Another reminder to stay active with your exchange and if there’s a news like this you have to act as fast as possible, don’t store your long term holdings on any crypto exchange because its not safe at all.

Just like what happened in FTX's own case where the CEO lost his position and relinquished power to another board member who is not involved in the scandal since his stake is 34% it makes no sense for another board member to hold the operation of the exchange since the amount involved is not too much to halt the operation of the exchange like what happens with FTX own case.

This is not the best time for fraudulent exchanges as their Top board members are getting exposed for illegal dealings.

This is a big accusation and can result to a collapse of this platform, the team should assure the public the safety of their funds since this is not a hack problem but a greedy problem.
If you have cryptos on this site get it now but don’t panic, transfer it to your secured wallet. Anyway, I don’t think the whole market will be affected by this news as we are already rising but there’s still a possibility if this issues will be affected their users, hopefully the up trend will stay strong and will not be affected by this negative news.

I don't think they or it will bring down Bithumb exchange but it can affect Bithumb exchange big time knowing that the founder is arrested and a criminal now. If ever they bring down Bithumb or filing bankruptcy voluntarily just like FTX can make a huge issue again on crypto especially on centralized exchange sector. Exchanges today are really a big mess and people should be aware of this potential risk of happening again, I hope people learn from these scenarios of not storing their money on centralized exchanges. It's crazy that centralized exchange anomaly is showing one by one, Should we expect more like this?

that's a garbage exchange site. This exchange site is full of manipulation by the team behind the exchange site. So much fake volume in any pair. I have ever traded there several times. The impact from bithumb to the crypto was not as big as FTX and so, I don't expect a huge dump gonna come later. The fact that the volume that owned by this exchange site was actually fake. Im not seeing the problem that happened with this site won't becoming a threat for crypto like FTX. This exchange site was garbage exchange site like coinsbit.

Im glad to see that CEO of this exchange site got arrested. I remember once people were unable to withdraw their money.

It is going to be difficult for the exchange to remain in business since the accusations are very serious, if the owner of the exchange was being arrested by charges unrelated to the exchange then you may have a point as the rest of the board members could just ask the CEO to quit, issue an apology and move on, but he was arrested for embezzlement and fraud, so I expect anyone using that exchange to get their coins out while they can, and they better hurry as we do not know for how long withdrawals will be allowed.

Either its true or not could affect its customers and users. News like this tend to stir the market too especially bithumb is one of the backboned exchange or one of the longest exchange. For a CEO to be in this kind of issue is considered bad already and might lead to such downfall and trust from the community.

Ive been using this market exchange for the last 3years since they also have a fair share of listed tokens of my holdings.

It's terrible how often prominent CEOs are in the news for being arrested for financial crimes. This is particularly concerning for anybody who has money sitting in a single exchange given the state of the market today. We all understand that the primary benefits of cryptocurrencies are their purported safety and anonymity, but it seems even regulated exchanges are no longer a secure refuge for our money.

That one person, even one with a relatively minor role inside the company, may have such power over our finances is disconcerting. You should thus pay great attention to market developments and news. A solid solution to avoid these kinds of issues is to keep our money out of exchanges and instead in a wallet that we have total control over.

I hope that Bithum will not be affected (at least hard) by this. We don't need another big exchange fall

It will be bad for us, I mean we have seen the market already recovered from the FTX collapsed, so we don't need another one to affect the market in a very negative way since it has gain so much in the month of February alone.

The good thing is that we are still above the $1 Trillion marketcap, so meaning we are just above the threshold and we are still very much bullish despite this news. And the news could be an isolated one, if he embezzled $50M worth of money, I do hope it's not crypto funds or anything.

It's been a long time since I traded on Bithumb anymore, and when I hear news like this I fear the same thing as FTX could happen to Buthumb. However, based on quite a variety of cases, he will only be fired and the vacant position will experience a significant impact. Starting from distrust of traders and performing simultaneous withdrawal actions may result in account suspension. Not a few cases like this will have an impact, the result is a decrease in trading volume. I do not expect the adverse impact that we will see on the bitcoin price.

I knew there was something not right about the exchange when I created an account with them some years back, around 2017. I logged in a few times and even traded until one time when I tried to log in and my account did not exist. Just like that, it was gone in a thin air. Fortunately, I had just a few dollars in there, maybe around $20. I didn't even bother to wasting time with their support.

Yeah, i didn't like the site and markets don't seem to care so i guess we are fine. If we are going to use FTX as an example, i heard they had they had some reserves in FTT token, which would be insanely irresponsible.

I was little afraid that if there would be bank run and again they would need to dump altcoins to get their reserves back and some companies invested in it would fall with it. But maybe this would be in a different scale anyway.

This is the reason why I don't trust exchange platform to store my funds or even leaving my funds in an exchange for a long time. As what Jerometash shared that his account never existed when he created an account in there and the next time he log in the account seems to never existed which is why we should never trust too much of our funds and time in an exchange. With the other platforms having problems then we surely don't want another one.

Bithumb can be savable as long as it is not connected on the CEO and the activities they did. There's not much info yet about the case since it is still on investigation but yeah there could be a possible withdrawal halt on bithumb in the future. People should really move there balance on bithumb because when things get tight, They can easily halt withdrawals just like FTX did and declare the company bankrupt. It would be safe to make a move now rather than doing it late given that a traffic of withdrawal can happen soon after the investigation.

Any failure of the CEO is always connected to the exchange since he is using the exchange for his personal gain. People will never trust again this kind of exchange even if they will change their CEO. Bithumb is already crumbling in the Korean market due to competition and tighten security for shady behavior of exchange. I think filing bankruptcy is their next move instead of risking more losses when they continue their operations since people will be scared using it. Users are probably escaping their asset from the exchange since this is almost same scenario with the FTX scandal.

I think mostly exchanges are using bot to increase their trading  volume even a lot of top tier exchanges, so that's doesn't mean those exchanges aren’t important for the crypto market, i have an account bithumb as i know that it’s a 2nd tier exchange, so if it will shutdown as like ftx then definitely market will be affected.

If you don't trust a crypto exchange then how do you trade coins? Using only p2p sites or on this forum? But, I think there are still risks in these types of trades. Not all crypto exchanges are scams/fraud but there are still exchanges left who are trustworthy. It's only not advised to store funds on them for a long time if you have no business there. For what if we have a crypto wallet if we don't use them?

There might be other explanations to the case of @Jerometash. Maybe he did some violations and the exchange delete his account, that is why he can't log in it anymore and he said he didn't bother complaining, maybe because he is really guilty.

I would like to see other crypto scammers arrested instead of moving freely around the world, like CEO Terra, or former FTX CEO. There is a lot of scams in the crypto-sphere, especially in centralized exchanges where insider trading and price manipulation are rampant. Tougher regulation would rid the community of characters like SBF or CEO of Bithumb.

He could have deleted but Jerometash did not explain that he deleted the account. Honestly, I am not trading cryptos right now and to tell you the truth, I do not trust exchanges that much and not trusting exchanges doesn't mean I won't use one. It may seems not what I just said that I don't trust exchanges. I even explained it that I don't trust exchanges to store my money for a long time or a certain time. Can't you just think that way?. Maybe I should have just explain that I don't trust exchanges to keep my funds safe when I am storing it. I think that should be enough to clear this misunderstanding.

They have the money, that’s why they are still walking around freely despite of what they did.
This news might affect the reputation of exchanges as well and fortunately this happened right now because the market is not that affected anymore. If there’s a manipulation on this platform, then probably users are at risk of losing their money, better to get out of this site now until this issues is going on for your own safety.

Different sources, different reasons of arrest. But whatever it is, it has something to do with money for sure. If it'z embezzlement of funds, then he obviously wants to follow the footsteps of SBF, but unfortunately not in volumes and amount that SBF did it. If it's due to price manipulation, there's no way the law enforcement is pinning him solely for this activity. I don't think there'd be a lot of panic with the CEO's arrest. Bithumb is one of those exchanges that receives the customers that do not want to deal with the large ones, so its market share is really not that big at all.

Technically SBF isn't free but in house arrest, which is way better then him dying in the jail like everyone seems to think would happen. Court procedure however takes time and should take time as you can't rush these things. Rushing could be an advantage for SBF.

But why an earth interpol haven't catched Do Kwon is a mystery. If i remember correctly people have even posted selfies with him in europe while he was hunted down. He has his passports frozen so i am guessing he moves with fake ids now.

i have used that exchange before but just like what you said, they do not have the big share in the crypto market industry. however, if you are a user of this exchange, better get out your funds while you can. you don't know what will happen next. even if it is only the CEO's fault about money matters. they can easily freeze your funds without warning.

This is what happened when the management isleft in the hand of a centralized authority.  Since people have access to all funds, they are tempted to do unexpected things that may lead to fund embezzlement, or defrauding their clients and customers.

But on the other side, this is not related to the cryptocurrency network but to the person who is managing a centralized exchange and this is another example of not trusting our cryptocurrency on exchanges.  If we want to trade, trade and then withdraw the fund after the transaction to keep our fund safe and away from being robbed by the malicious people behind centralized exchanges.

He was embellishing the money in centralised environment where he is doing the corporate job? Definitely giving me another reason not trust the corporate world anymore and crypto currency is really really weak space and it can get hampered with such news quickly. And yes if he is holding that much shares in the company then he should be thrown out of the company after proper investigation. It is entirely fine if people start withdrawing money from Bithumb because it’s there choice and they are not going just give away money just like that.

The fact that the CEO was arrested means the reputation of that exhange was surely dragged down. The South Korean authorities have not provided additional information regarding the case but since the rumours about the tax evasion and embezzlement were announced online, those who have their crypto coins on that exchanged surely pulled out already their assets.

I still believe that the  impact on users will depend on the outcome of the said Bithumb CEO legal case and the financial stability of the exchange. However, always remember to be careful whenever we store our assets to this kind of exchange as it is always vulnerable to some conflicts and problems like this in the future.

That should be the way things are supposed to work, but a CEO has access to resources which they may never had access on their own so they can hire the best lawyers, use their political connections and the amount of money they stole to shield themselves from any adverse effects they are supposed to suffer, not only that they can convert their funds to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and make the recovering of that money way harder for the authorities, so even if we are seeing the police finally taking action against them they can still act as if nothing happened.