Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

Bitcoin-24 just went down after reports in the local chat of problems with the exchange engine. Reports of duplications of trades appearing, as well as trades where returns go missing completely. Someone posted this screen http://imgur.com/Sbe6OlG.

One can speculate that the site will be down and try to roll-back trades, if possible. It is not clear if bitcoins were withdrawn. Chat reports of hotwallet being empty suggest withdraws did not execute. If this was due to quick earlier withdraw of corrupted funds or unrelated is not clear.

I am a victim...

Hope they make a way to have access to funds. I really like the engine, but i think we should go with decentralized solutions for the exchange problem.

In the last minute i sold everything and cancel all orders...

Any news when this will be fixed. Where can I get more information. Their twitter account does not say anything.

Strange my Mobil Phone App is still working.
Seems like the Api is still online.

Protip: Don't use the word "handy"  ;) No one outside of Germany understands that. It's a German-Denglish-Invention. The rest of the world says (smart) phone, cell or mobile.

There is a mobile app? Where did you get it from?

Ok, I saw an unofficial one in the market. Seems crazy to uninstall an unoffical app though :/
#

ha ha hah

handy

you like to wank your app!

I would HIGHLY appreciate a statement of Simon whats happened and what he's gonna to solve the probs since i have a few k€ in i can't access or withdraw and i'm really nervous about the lack of information!

My personal deadline for this is 6.30pm CET, after this i'm gonna file a charge of fraudulent conversion / computer fraud direct to the district attorneys office, including:

- taking him into custody 'cause of danger of suppression of evidence and/or danger of absconding since he has his pockets full of(our!!) money.
- freezing all bankaccounts he has access to
- seizure order of ALL his IT-equipment

This means we won't get our money back fast, but he can't get easy away with it, too! And spending a weekend in custody doesn't sound funny to me!


Und nochmal in deutsch:

Ich erwarte ein Statement bis 18.30 was passiert ist, wie das Problem gefixt wird, wann wieder Zugang zu unseren Account besteht! Ansonsten geht um 18.35 ein Fax an die zuständige Staatsanwaltschaft Bremen, Abteilung 3, raus.

- Anzeige wegen gewerbsmässiger(!!!) Unterschlagung/Untreue/Computerbetrug sowie aller anderen in Frage kommenden Straftatbestände!
- Beantragung eines SOFORT vollstreckbaren Haftbefehls wegen Flucht- und Verdunkelungsgefahr, Geld genug hat er ja zur Verfügung!
- Sperrung aller bekannten Kontoverbindungen
- Beschlagnahme des gesamten IT-Equipments

Ich hab gehört, ein Wochenende in U-Haft ist nicht so dolle....

Dude, don't do that, it's only gonna make matters worse and delay the time it takes for everyone to get access back.

Yeah, dude, please be nice to the scammers, otherwise they might run away with the money.

god fucking dammmit. This is not me. I have been hacked, any activity that has been logged in the past 8 hoursis a hacker. they asked multiple members for 10+ btc loans because funds were "tied up" in gox. I never have or will use gox.

When wil we know more about this? I had euros and BTC in there...

You have any proof he is a scammer? I'm also concerned as I have money and transfers heading there..

What is better, few days or weeks delay in getting your funds back or never get them back, huh? Will you compensate me for the loss? If yes, i might change my mind!

About 2.5hrs from now to write a few lines WHY he is offline, WHAT he is doing to fix it, WHEN we will be able to withdraw our money/BTC should be long enough so we all see he is caring about it. And if he ran away with our deposits, he better pray police finds him faster than the guys i'm gonna hire!

Not to mention i'm VERY pissed after Gox fucked it all up, i'm gonna loose some more money to a >probably< scammer! 

Two hours ago i managed myself to get into my account thanks a cached version. I cancelled all my orders @~43€/bitcoin and sold all my bitcoins @80€ in order to stay in €....

After that, and chatting a little with the people still connected, i got kicked from the site.

Now i have managed another way to enter into my account, and i see again my bitcoins... so it seems to me that the guy is doing the roll-back thing.

Hot wallet is not sending bitcoins... so i have risen my optimistic view from 2% to 34%... at least he seems to be doing something.

How far you think he's going to roll back? What about the people who had extra coins and cashed out already?

Seem like the hot wallet was empty and there are still around 15K coins on the cold wallets:

https://blockchain.info/de/address/1GcWYgqbdtzZAGsX2iSVBS74cPBiQjCiRg (https://blockchain.info/de/address/1GcWYgqbdtzZAGsX2iSVBS74cPBiQjCiRg)
https://blockchain.info/de/address/1AnixjBYxpTzAmfSa8kRdBiUaSGV2e9d26 (https://blockchain.info/de/address/1AnixjBYxpTzAmfSa8kRdBiUaSGV2e9d26)

so maybe it's not so bad as it seems. The fiat should be on the bank still.

He had -at least- 2 wallets in order to prevent attackers to cash out all his bitcoins. When you try to cash out from the system he asks you for a code, so you have to go to your email and confirm you are using your account. Step two the system enqueues the transaction to be processed, and then when the hot wallet is filled, the system sends the transaction.

I suppose that yes, some people would have been able to cash out some funds. But not so many as you might think, as the hot wallet was empty and now stopped.

We'll see...

he should rollback orders untill the balance matches with what he's got. And honestly, the site might lose some reputation but i'd preffer if the loses are splitted between everybody.

If he closes the site and attends reclamations, the process can last forever and the price of bitcoin might be compromised, also it might appear on the news.

If people try to press charges the cost for lawyers, court etc. will directly come off our money. No way we will win anything that way.

My honest opinion seeing companies going bankrupt and then somehow nothing is left for the investors while the lawyers are pouring champagne on the floor.

Damn it! I hope this problem can be solved quickly. I have quite a few BTC and EUR in there.

Bump

still no news?

Seems like the next big pile of shit is gonna hit the fan in 20 minutes

https://i.imgur.com/5JK38a0.jpg

Edited names, domains and sums, but be sure they are on the original. Might edit few words tho. And there are attorneys and judges on stand-by duty this weekend...

And btw, if someone will give Simon a call, look up his number at www.hotfrog.de/Firmen/Simon-Hausdorf-Webdesign

i am confused. There is no evidence he stoled the money or got hacked, so why that huge panic?

What exactly is this. Cannot read German. Can you please give some more info.

Note that we can still access the site using this method (but no withdrawls, waiting for the email code but not received).

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c77qg/bitcoin24_down_after_a_corrupt_trade_engine_gives/c9dtqe5

Please hold off on taking a drastic step until a couple more hours. Lets see if this shit sorts itself out before we fling it on the fan.

At the first sight, even Bernie Madoff looked inspirig confident...so your argument is more than invalid!

Oh, and i think meanwhile most of you found out that his publich phone number isn't active anymore  :P

EDIT:

Referring to Amitabhs previous post i'm gonna delay my step for a few hours. Amitabh: This paper will be send to the district attorneys office (german "Staatsanwaltschaft") and includes all what i said few hrs ago:

- filing a charge of fraudulent conversion / computer fraud, including:
- taking him into custody 'cause of danger of suppression of evidence(manipulating the database or deleting it) and/or danger of absconding since he has his pockets full of(our!!) money.
- freezing all bankaccounts he has access to
- seizure order of ALL his IT-equipment so authorities can examine it
- sequestration of cars or other valuable stuff to cover the losses...he might drive around in a ferrari, who knows?!

This is a request to arrest the owner using police force because the accusing person is fearing he has been defrauded.
Fear and Greed, Greed and Fear.

what happens if you log in? your balance is empty? (I am afraid to look  :( )

Coppers will only laugh at you if you bring this shit up with no fraud evidence at all.

exactly! it's just a piece of paper, nothing more

The site has been down for less than a day and you are already considering police action against the owner?

That's really really scary. If this type of thing starts to come up a lot, you can say goodbye to anyone personally trying to provide a service to the bitcoin community ever again.

It's a web service. Shit happens. I think your best chance to ever see your balances/coins is if Simon remains a free man and can work on restorting it all. He obviously hasnt processed ANY withdrawals of any currency or bitcoin, so if he can work on it chances are in 24 hours the site will be back to normal.

PS.- I have 1k euro tied up there so I am not just saying that.

well at least some news so we know what is going on

yes, i thought the same.

my god .... this started maybe as a hobby .... and when the site is some hours off, people already are calling police ... what next ??

give this man a chance to sort this out !!

fresh from their website:

https://bitcoin-24.com/ (https://bitcoin-24.com/)

Hmm very strange. Why did the Polish authority close my account? Also, I don't remember having an account in Poland.

What was the IP adress to access the site?

 ;D ;D ;D

 ;D

( i guess he copied & paste some mail he got from some partner in poland )

Man :-/ ...

0) I will not tell you why this message/informations did appear on his web-site NOW in spite I have a very good guess ....

1) I know Simon, he is no native english speaker/writer (like me) and probably he types these sentences in a hurry, at least in high time-pressure.

2) Ever heard of typos? For me, the y in the word "your" is one and then the sentence (with my background infos and deleting this "y") makes perfect sense!

A friendly pointer to these nervous guys: calm down, this would be better for everybody. :)
smtp

Beutelschneider, I think this really would not help the situation right now. If he was to be in police custody then he can't work on solving the problem. Patience is necessary at this stage.

If there was any technical problem, then it was sensible to take the server offline for the moment. That is in the best interests of everyone trading on the exchange.

Please be patient and give the exchange and the person running it a chance to solve the problem first.

I hope all works out well.

Simon knew about this bug since at least 11 days, since then there is a youtube video telling about it. Also several user messaged him that problem. He didnt solve it, in fact, it got worse. Me and a friend got a high 5 figure sum locked in withdrawal right now. I think the actions Beutelschneider takes are good and just take care of our funds.

I'm feeling more confident about this now. I was thinking for a while what he could mean by declarations and then realised he means his database transactions.

I am pretty sure before he pays out ALL bitcoins with a cronjob, he checks that the balances match up and it makes sense. If not, the site probably goes down automatically and notifies him. So its just a matter of time when his database back up will rectify to the latest consistent state and meanwhile he is probably fixing the bug that caused all this.

Fingers crossed!

got a couple of grand in withdrawals, I hope he publishes a statement and sorts it out

Funny, but it surely was a typo, and they meant "our" instead of "your".

Thanks for all that :)

you are an a*****e

Yes i'm certainly considering action against him, due to the lack of information at all! Sometimes you need to announce drastic steps to get a reaction. Even ShitGox gave a statement what went wrong. And get the facts together:

- Running a Ltd. when there is a similar form of business in germany, too. Its called "Unternehmergesellschaft, haftungsbeschränkt" you can start with €100 for example.
- Lot of people pissed and spamming the chat 'cause they are waiting for few weeks to get their money out of BTC24 or account funded with sent money.
- According to few pics i found, looked like he runs several (at least 5 or 6, maybe more) 5GH/s Bitforce miners. All of you are able to calculate...
- Huge crash that has happened, panic everywhere
- Never seen him in chat or must have missed him. Normally i'd show up and answer questions, talk to my clients few times a day for 10 minutes or so. Let them feel you are there even if not visible!
- People waiting one or two weeks to get their mails answered. If i can't cope with that workload, i have to hire people for that!
- Phone number i've found isn't active
- Lots of moniez that could be sent to the caymans on a keystroke and spent for coke and whores  :P
- A lot more reasons i'm too lazy to tell..

And now ask yourself, how would you pull a really profitable scam?

1 - Build up trust, process all orders correct
2 - Grow, receive more trust (and more money/BTC) to work with, still process all correct
3 - Repeat step 2
4 - See the price rise, sell your mined BTC on other xchanges, make profit
5 - Make profit from the spread when ppl trade on your platform like every FOREX dealer does
6 - Upgrade and improve your service with the profit you made so clients think you're caring and resposible, think before you act!
7 - If you're a good guy, go back to step 2  ;)

now we have 2 ways:
- Decide to work with coins you got from your clients. Buy cheap and sell high or sell BTC when high and buy cheap back. If you have losses, cover them with the miners you're running
- As reaction to the crash, sell BTC(regardless of whether your customers or your own) on various xchanges, making a million € or two...and run

I think most of you never ran their own business, dealing with all sorts of idiots out there, ppl not willing to pay their invoices and so on. Sometimes you have to draw a line!

And according to the "greed&fear - fear&greed" comment, i'm mining for about 2yrs on BTCguild and i really love how its run! And at some point, i want some of my investment back even if i don't need to pay for power!

As there is a statement now, nothing will follow at this point. I hope i won't be disappointed in th near future!

So the trading engine froze at the same time as authorities froze his bank account? hmmm...

Yeah, sounds fishy to me too. No mention of the bug either though I clearly witnessed it and I had a few 1000 euro extra balance that I shouldnt have had. Which means someone else or btc-24 is missing that. Last time I checked they werent a central bank.

you are an a*****e
[/quote]

Be sure i checked that number before, i don't wanna have hundreds of ppl calling him, keeping him away from work if he tries to fix the engine  ;) .

And yeah, sometimes you have to be an asshole. You have to say "NO STEP FURTHER" sometimes and defend your point of view in the first, even if it might piss off people. But you always have to be open for other arguments, discuss them, think your position over, move a bit when the opposite moves, too. In the end you have a solution were all keep up appearances.

Since i have a few thousand € in there, i can be your worst nightmare if you don't treat me well!  

EDIT:

There are several video-broadcasting sites like justin.tv or livestream.com. If simon would broadcast an explanation it would restore a lot of faith! No matter if he's not that good with english, many german ppl would understand and give him credit if it makes sense what he says!

EDIT2:

I get back to the PMs ASAP, need some food now :D
  

This isn't the first time Bitcoin-24 has gone down.  All the exchanges seem to also have problems recently, even (especially) Mt Gox.

So far I can't see that there's any evidence that anything fraudulent is going on from the side of Bitcoin-24.  Far as I can see the person running the exchange is not a crook.

The only reason they would take the server offline temporarily is if there are technical issues. Which apparently there are.

So we can only wait until these problems are solved. There's nothing Staatsanwaltschaft or police or anyone else can do to help at this point, the person running the exchange has to deal with it.

The fact is all these Bitcoin exchanges are badly operated right now, there are technical problems all over the place.  Poor communication not least is one of the problems. The whole set up is not very professional.

By the way, I also have Euro and Bitcoins deposited with Bitcoin-24.

I also find it pretty fishy. There is something he's not telling us...

I am still undecided what the shutdown means, but you sir should have lost this money in the recent crash.

Trading engine crashing is understandable. But why were the bank accounts frozen. More details needed.

i don't think so because he changed the bank account in his website (from the polish account to his personal account) 2-3 days ago.
While the website went down at around 12:00 GMT today

maybe I shouldnt think out loud... but the statement on the website about the lawyers and the bank account makes me wonder...

bitcoin price crash.. the Polish bank account gets shut. Now using account (private? in own name, not business name?  in Germany...  Shock publicity about the crash leading to action by the banks to forbid transfers to/from bitcoin operators...

WTF do you mean by that ? Should have lost??? That doesn't mean anything.

Simon Hausdorfs Bitcoin Wallets:

Cold Storage:

1GcWYgqbdtzZAGsX2iSVBS74cPBiQjCiRg > https://blockchain.info/address/1GcWYgqbdtzZAGsX2iSVBS74cPBiQjCiRg
Balance: 8,848.39013303

Semi Hot Wallet (maybe Cold storage):
1AnixjBYxpTzAmfSa8kRdBiUaSGV2e9d26 > https://blockchain.info/address/1AnixjBYxpTzAmfSa8kRdBiUaSGV2e9d26
Balance: 7,100.77857022

Hot Wallet:
1BTC24yVKQdQNAa4vX71xLUC5A8Za7Rr71 > https://blockchain.info/address/1BTC24yVKQdQNAa4vX71xLUC5A8Za7Rr71
Balance: 0

Affiliated Wallets, probably his own, since all the affiliated addresses send each other coins:

1AfY3571v8VbhMq19DA44378qSXPQmv734 > https://blockchain.info/address/1AfY3571v8VbhMq19DA44378qSXPQmv734
Balance: 599
Received BTC from 1GcWY as well as 1Anixj
https://blockchain.info/tx/e83076451c35e85733686d238ba6ae0d5bf7a3ce80d4c04390625e6f6e75157a
https://blockchain.info/tx/d50082cf25e3ea2b9f7811c5c747fd2414004c2bb1e7f100028f23f642c65565

1MVCn7PuFtnCgHKjYvVpqE62ifVKNCA8mU > https://blockchain.info/address/1MVCn7PuFtnCgHKjYvVpqE62ifVKNCA8mU
Balance: 1,532.00
Received BTC from 1Anix as well as 1AfY


Makes a total of 18079 BTC in control of Simon Hausdorf, and thats what I found in about 5 Minutes work. If we search deeper, we might find more. I found some edgy 96.xxxxBTC transfers from 1Anix but I am not sure if they are his because some of them are spend. But its unusual he sends money from 1Anix, since this is his cold storage(or maybe not).

Feel free to contribute.

Regarding the German/Polish account. I deposited Euros to the Polish account 09.04.2013 in the evening, not realizing that the account number changed. Since my bank refused to cancel the payment, I filed a support ticket at btc-24 with following response:

This is an email from 10.04.2013

here he asked about how to fix the bug back then:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15026825/php-mysql-how-to-prevent-two-requests-update

---via http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c864t/what_happened_on_bitcoin24_today/

Holy crap, I can't believe he was not using FOR UPDATE transactions to begin with. I wonder if he was using InnoDB... now I am a little bit worried!!

php+mysql might not be the best platform for order book processing... just saying...

Only hours later, after obtuse tweets about DDOS that seemed, in the end, to be inaccurate.

You mostly listed irrelevant rumours, and those that are true are mostly just artifacts of being a small business suddenly overrun with customers.  No, it's not a good way to run a business, but it's also neither fraud nor illegal in any form.

So what?  If that's personal then it's none of your concern.  If it's business then it's good, his business should be well set to make good any debts he owes as a result of the trading engine bugs.  From what I've seen all the errors are in the customer's favour, so so far the only loser is the site, and hopefully the profits cover those losses.

I've never seen my bank manager in chat, but I didn't send the police over when their website was down last summer.

Why should it be, did they officially publish it?  It's still not a crime.

And now ask yourself, how would you pull a really profitable scam?

Do you have a copy of the terms and conditions you agreed to?  Has he violated any?  I don't recall seeing any form of SLA or other uptime guarantee.  It's the nature of all these trading sites - they are unregulated, any money or coins you deposit are theirs to hold on your behalf, and although you may hope to be able to access them easily, in practice all these sites seem to have variable performance, especially for withdrawals.

I really don't agree with the way Simon is accused and threatened here.

I do understand you are worried about your funds. It's rightful to feel worried and concerned.

But accusing him of fraud and threatening with violence locking him up in a cage, I find repulsive!

To the one doing this, I feel angry with you.

It is absolutely immoral to threaten to initiate violence against him.

I would never offer any services to you, knowing that you have no problem initiating violence when I fail to deliver.

Even if it was true that he defrauded you of your money, it's still immoral to initiate violence.


Take responsibility for your own actions.

As you know the exchange is basically free and living from donations. Donations that are needed to pay for customer support, technical support and legal support for example.  

Have you given any donations that can actually pay a bill or two?


I do want to thank you for your sharing of information and research. And again my sympathies to you and all the others with high stress and concerns you experience due to this.

About the bank account. From what I understand here it seems to be 2 accidents following up shortly. First the bank account being closed by authorities in Poland, which he did not announce before today (right?) but he did change bank account a few days ago to his personal one, which makes sense to me as he used also his personal account before he incorporated and openend an account in Poland. I would appreciate more info about why that government closed the account and if they seized the funds or were ok with releasing them.

Can anyone post the hot and cold wallet addresses. I'd like to verify what funds were moved and when.

just look a few posts above yours

Ahh I had seen those before. Too much stressed to remember that now. My bad.

+1 I agree but we should really get Simon to update if possible.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175123.msg1822998#msg1822998 <--- GO HERE!

bla bla, build your own exchange, but be sure i sue your ass off if it lags more then 0.0001 !
you knew what you did when you registered with bitcoin-24. if something is fishy its 100% your fault, this is not your protected little consumer world, this is the bitcoin universe. never invest money you cant afford to loose, never (real wordl, internet or anywhere). stay cool or stay away.

It may come as a surprise to you but we all indeed keep that in mind.. "never invest what we are not willing to lose"

However, "willing to lose" is different from "not getting pissed off when you lose your money that you were willing to lose"

yeah of course, but theres a difference between discussing the fact that a site went offline, if api keys where misused, if the admin is trading himself by setting limits he knows of before they are published, if innodb or myisam was used etc etc and that whining and aggravating and instantly threatening everybody.
no one knows if anything is lost at bitcoin-24, we will see. theres no point in getting pissed at the moment, besides beeing an asshole :)

hello.

and who is still trading at Bitcoin-24.com?
http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/4682/tradesclosed2.png
http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/btc24EUR_trades.html

Interesting.

In USD no trades, ...
http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/3120/tradesclosed4usd.png
http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/btc24USD_trades.html

only in EUR:
http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6144/tradesclosed3.png
http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitcoin24/EUR

Did he do something stupid like leave API access active when he "shutdown" the site?  If so and there is a flaw in the trading engine well that would be ... bad right?

Well shit. I have money in deposit there.
 >:(
And who are trading in Eur now?
o-O

Cross posting for a noob who doesn't have access


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175205.0

 ;D i imagine the police to confiscate the hardware... this would mean the police stores the stuff in some basement forever because they dont know how to handle anything related to IT.

Exactly. And if that happens people would probably never get their money.

was it possible from bitcoin-24 send own bitcoins to another wallet? Do you think would be possible is somehow now?

No more trades... two hours ago.
http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitcoin24/EUR

http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/8913/tradesclosed13eur.png
http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/btc24EUR_trades.html

any news?

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c7utl/bitcoin24com_the_polish_authority_closed_your_our/c9eb1h6

No need to real worry until those balances start to shrink or disappear without anyone receiving their money back. Since fast withdraw is essential to a scammer, I don't think Simon is planning to scam us or all the money would be long gone. Of course, if people start calling the police too soon, that can trigger some undesirable consequences. Simon knows it's hard to run anywhere in modern European Union or even abroad. No need to remember him that. And he already updated his message on https://bitcoin-24.com/. At least the "closed your Bank account in Poland" was changed. But he should prepare things in order to allow people to withdraw their bitcoins. Or, at least, write a more assuring message about he returning all the money and give us some kind of deadline.

wrong, now there are trades again!

http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/btc24EUR_trades.html


notice how all the latest ones have executed in duplicate/triplicate too. always the sign of a healthy trading engine :)

Maybe he is testing the new code.

on an exchange that is effectively live though? while his customers still have active orders, no less.

i think someone has just worked out how to access the exchange and is taking advantage of the glitch to inflate their balance. you can see that orders are regularly executed twice, giving double coins/EUR, which you can then trade the opposite way in multiple tiny orders and have many of those executed twice too. end result = free money essentially. i tried it briefly few hours ago and increased my EUR balance by 200 in about 5 mins... stopped straight away of course (and am ready/willing to hand the funds back)

trading engine is an absolute joke atm - this is why i didn't want to share how to get in

But from where comes the opposite for your trade? do you need to do "crosstrade", trade with yourself? You dont trade/match with other orders from other market participants, right?
From where comes the money (200 eur) you earned?

I like to understand the leak.

Thanks

From all the users funds???

Damn...

nowhere - it doesn't really exist other than in bitcoin24's database. for whatever reason, the trading engine is spazzing out and crediting twice (or more) for trades in some instances. it doesn't matter how i'm buying from or selling to really, because the amount of free coins being made out of thin air by the bug makes it impossible to lose.

i tested this last night when i was the only one on it (seemingly). i don't mind detailing this now because the site is properly down and no-one can get in to take advantage, but if i'd revealed how as soon as i knew this could have been happening for hours. from memory i did:

make buy order 1 btc @ ~80 euro
make buy order 1 btc @ ~80 euro
account is credited for 3 btc, only 160 euro taken

make sell order 0.1 btc @ ~77 euro
x30

account is credited for 4.5btc worth of trades @ 77euro/btc

so i ended up with approximately +200EUR more than when i started over the course of a few minutes and just some quick clicking. really i should have been down about 6EUR i guess.

i was clicking very rapidly when making the buy/sell orders in order to reproduce the glitches i'd read about and it obviously worked very well. however even when NOT trying to induce a problem the glitch would still occur - i made a small trade just so i could see if the BTC withdrawal function was working, and ended up getting credited two or three times. just a simple, one click buy order, with no load on the engine as i was just about the only person there. something is clearly very wrong. i wasn't on the exchange this time yesterday but i can see why it was taken offline so abruptly if this was happening. it also explains why the hotwallet is being kept empty - if everyone draws out their coins this can't be corrected. if the coins stay in the system, the database of trades can be rolled back (as i understand it) and BTC/EUR/USD balances can be restored to something resembling 'normality' before the glitch.

if anyone is to lose out it should be bitcoin24 as they will (morally at least(!)) have to settle their customers' accounts whilst also taking the hit of whatever bitcoins were wrongly credited by the trading engine and quickly extracted. the admin hasn't disappeared just yet (posted on reddit earlier) so i haven't lost all hope.

url ?

:)
why he hasn't updated his site i don't know

Thinking about it, the most annoying thing about this is that it prevented me from buying at yesterdays low. Today the price is almost double... bah, that would have been a nice profit margin! Boo. Anyway, hopefully it will be back up tomorrow :)

 ::) ::) ::) ::) ::) I suggest you switch to a well known FOREX broker, IMHO oanda has a very good reputation! If you want a nice client interface, try FXCM! And their platforms are much more reliable than the systems run by a handfull of ppl or one-man-bands like Simon!  ::) ::) ::) ::) ::)


By this point, i won't consider any legal action against him as (i hope  :D) he is working to fix that giant pile of shit that occurred. Calling the authorities on him would be the last option if he would try and run away or giving a shit on us and our money/BTC in.
 

I wish I shared your optimism. A zero fee exchange with huge bug in trading engine, site closed, change of banks, talk of lawyers,..
Getting just half my coins/euros back at some point, is more then Im willing to bet on right now.

Could you stop small talk please. This is an important topic an should be the place for exchange of relevant information.
Thanks

If you want know something about Simon and his business:
http://www.reddit.com/user/TAiS46

Why he hold btc if the problem is bank account?

I suggest:

What about sending all funds in bitcoins?

1) Instant
2) No wait to the bank account problem to solve

That is exactly my question !
I never made a trade on btc24 either
I just "parked" my bitcoins there

Do you guys think we will ever see our money again?

this.

the word "lawyers" is worrying

You seem to forget that bitcoin-24 was a trading center! There you could buy and sell btc to or from those who want to sell or buy. From where should Simon take btc for your Euro or Dollars? He can only pay back what you have there!
let us hope he will do it finally...
MY BIG problem with him is that he never comes here and tells us what really happened and what he will do to solve the problems!

And for the btc: there have been problems too, as you know. Some where sold twice or more. He have to figure out what happened! Till he really know how much btc every client have he cannot pay SOME back!

i suspect the reason he is holding BTC is because of the trading engine glitches causing people to get free coins. if everyone cashes out he can't rollback the trades and undo the damage. i imagine a lot of people transferred their funds out as soon as they realised what was happening so he might already be down.

then again i've seen no acknowledgement from him at all that there was any problem with the trading engine, so who knows... a bit of communication would go a long way here!

Arrest warrants, court orders, court judgments... they're all just pieces of paper, but they will screw up peoples' life.

The situation is, we are absolutely blind at the moment.

First of all, anyone here who knows Simon personally. Try to get in contact and retrieve information. Has anyone any form of communication with him?

Second. The information policy is absolutely unsatisfying. What's the reason. Too much problems to solve, advice of lawyer, or just with intent to defraud? I don't know. What can we do. He should know, that lag of information doesn't make things better.

I suppose there are a lot of people, more or less involved in this matter. Give your thoughts.

Lol look that name up in stackexchange/overflow "how does I float calculations?" that is why there's trading engine problems. never use float when money is involved http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15165559/how-to-round-amounts-correct-update-1

----- RANT -----
How can I be so unfortunate that I send a deposit hours before the site goes down? I was so upset on Mt.Gox that I lost my trust in it - when their service went down like the 5th time after they promised they made huge improvements those I haven't seen; I immediately transferred all my funds to Bitcoin-24 when Mt.Gox came back online, in the hope that I get better service there. Went to sleep, woke up, saw my transaction was confirmed, was glad; then saw Bitcoin-24: "Our Service is momentarily not available." - no worries, they must be doing some maintenance, all trading sites have problems these days - Vircurex was also down like a week ago.

But now I'm getting worried that maybe I never see my money again, which would mean the end of the Bitcoin business for me: since I'm poor like hell, I don't have more money to invest. It was a huge luck that I ever got here, since I got in half a year ago when BTC was at ~9-10 EUR. Those times it was affordable for me, and anyway, my original investment has already returned, nevertheless I would have liked to see my profits grow larger - it would help a lot in my financial situation, I found it possible that some day it would end my poverty.
----- End Of Rant -----

(Why this forum doesn't have spoiler tags?)

Nah, to be more constructive; my highly optimistic guess is that Simon doesn't communicate more because he's hell busy fixing the site. As an IT person, he would probably prefer to solve the problem at hand and then do the communication. When you're really into something, communication might be distractive. Either he's working on the problem or communicate; probably he doesn't have time or energy to do both at once. (The case of Mt.Gox was different, however: since they are a huge business, I'd expect much more professionalism from them in the field of communication - they are even able to hire people just for the sole purpose of communication.)

Well, I sent a kind e-mail to Simon, asking my BTC back - no reply since then, but note I just sent it less than a day ago, so patience is a virtue. Likely that the trade engine was shut down before it could pick up my deposit: it's still sitting on my deposit address, and I think my transaction wasn't even confirmed when the site closed. I guess my deposit wasn't even registered in the system - all he needs to do is to transfer my money from the deposit address to my address, no database hacking or anything is necessary. Since my money didn't took part of the chaos caused by the trade engine bug, I'm hoping he's gonna send it back to me.



I guess he's just too busy to do that at the moment, it would be a lengthy and complicated task - probably he's better off fixing the site soon and then let people to withdraw their funds on their own.

I know I might sound naively optimistic, actually I'm also worried (as you can see in my above rant), but as for now, I'd like to exercise some more understanding and trust what he wrote: "All funds (EUR, USD, PLN, GBP & Bitcoins) are safe.".



True. :( Hope we'll get some more enlightenment soon.

To open up full trading again the account balance would need to be able to be released and transferred to the other bank account.

My suspicion is that alongside the database engine issue there could be problems with the funds in the closed Polish account being frozen.

Why do I think this? Looking at the way this exchange was run. Plus the announcement on the website "our lawyers are working on a solution".

You do not need solutions from lawyers simply when a bank account is closed. The balance is simply transferred to another account. There is some other reason.

Why would bank account funds be frozen? Banks and other institutions are required to take preventative action if they suspect their facilities may be being used for money laundering or other illegal activity. With the customer being a Bitcoin exchange, there could be issues concerning AML/KYC compliance (or possibly as seems the case here, the lack of it).

This suggests to me it could be more than a simple account closure and move to another bank account involved here. These AML/KYC regulations will most likely apply to both accounts: Poland and Germany.  

Lawyers working on a solution. We know how fast lawyers work (paid by the hour and they dont work weekends).

footnote: I do not know for sure if the above is 100% the case, it's just conjecture. I hope things are not that involved.


EDIT: Note to moderators. There are at least 3 threads on this topic currently active, wouldnt it make sense to merge them into one?

Simon has been uncommunicative in the past as well, so nothing new here. What is disturbing is the type of questions he has asked on Stackoverflow. These and the fact that he is the sole person running the show should have been more public. I blame the people on this forum for not disbursing this information well enough. They should be held responsible for our loss, apart from Simon. (those that knew these two facts and still kept quiet). 

I did the same mistake and transferred bitcoins there hours before this happening.
Its all our mistake for not doing due-diligence in the matter. Basically bitcoin-24 is a "one-man-show". How an exchange run by a single guy (a single point of failure, if you may) can be called "the biggest European exchange" is beyond me.

In the future, NEVER put your money where only one person is in charge of it... I would say at least two people need to be in control of the funds.

boys boys, is anyone in contact with MTGOX and the other exchanges? they should know about this.
I mean, really,
the "panic" selling 3 days ago, may very well just been due to this,
See:
People make funny money on bitcoin-24, then started transfered to mtgox or other exchanges
 some cashed out for $ but others "see the ones doing the pump and dump" just pumped the price until the crash
rinse, repeat, until btcoin-24 hot wallet was out of coins.


Or i was the only one at 180Eur doing arbitrage with the exchanges, buy gox 180 sell bitcoin-central 190... etc?
and i didn't know anything about the bug, i just knew: damn prices are higher in European exchanges.

How many people saw that video? And how many people knew it before! you don't need to be a hacker to use this to "steal"

Now, i never transferred money there, just 0.5 btc, it thought it was fishy that they didn't have trading fees, this is not good,
it's impossible, any real forex always has a margin even small but some, and it protects against any rounding error.

Another indication, his VouchX was ALWAYS empty in the last week! so people, So i knew there was some kind of huge arbitrage going on.
when was the last time anyone did a "real" sepa order and transfered money out?

Now if i had money there i will be concerned if he can really roll back everything. i guess he will try to honor the monies of the people that make deposits
you can say bye bye to your coins there. Since he didn't have trading fee he has no assets! And be sure people siphoned money out of there via vouchx and btc.

That's why he have to contact big exchanges and ask them to freeze accounts of people that used the bug to siphoned btc out changed for money and is at their withdrawal limits!

It is possible that only very little funds have actually been taken off btc24.  They all seem to be stuck

I remember people in bitcoin-24 website chat were complaining about extremely long delays with bitcoin withdrawals, up to 12h. Maybe larger amounts were manually checked to make sure they were not a result of the trading bug? When my SEPA deposit was finally credited, I just bought the bitcoins and withdrew them and the transfer was on the network within 15mins or so, at the same time someone was complaining about a half a day delay with his btc withdrawal. That would mean that maybe the loss caused by the trading system is actually limited, but since the website was pretty much profitless, might be just enough for the website owner to not be able to cover it.

bitcoin.de forum has more info https://forum.bitcoin.de/boersen-handelsplaetze/632-ist-mit-bitcoin-24-los-4.html#post3496


Lol angry mob of germans after him in meatspace

TAiS46 said "ETA will be given tomorrow!".

My money is still sitting at the deposit address - so it hasn't been spent, this is good. On the other hand, I still haven't received a reply for my e-mail, though I think he must be overloaded with e-mails right now.

But reading the above, I'm getting worried. Several exchange sites experienced several problems so far, but AFAIK it never ever happened that a site had lost its clients' money! :o There are so many sites I could have moved on to from Mt.Gox and I had to choose this?! >:( That money is more than I ever had in my life at once (despite it's not a horrible amount, actually)!

I want my money back! Seriously!

Even though I said what I said in my previous post, I think after ~2-3 days after the incident, the time has really arrived for some proper communication. At least, he must see the panic, he should really jump in to give an explanation or provide a way for refunds. It frustrates me that I have no control over my money, and it's even more frustrating that probably I won't have ever again.



Where?

In his latest Reddit post (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c7utl/bitcoin24com_the_polish_authority_closed_your_our/c9evqfb).

This!

So don't only check BTC-24 coldwallet, also check your deposit addresses! There are tons of BTC still sitting there....!!

Mine are still in my deposit address....

Let's quote it here, just in case:


Source:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c7utl/bitcoin24com_the_polish_authority_closed_your_our/c9evqfb

I can confirm the btc are still on my deposit address.

i checked my deposit adress.

my last desposit 04/11 evening is still there. earlier deposits where moved to 1AnixjBYxpTzAmfSa8kRdBiUaSGV2e9d26
this is the cold wallet right?

i think the whole trade engine mess ist not the big problem. maybe simon did not loose any cent because the hot wallet is empty most of the time and i guess he noticed the mess before he refunded it.
i am more worried about the blocked account. it might take a long time if there was need that lawyers are involved. and i start to think about how to actually withdraw fiat money (never did that before). as i read in this thread started by simon, there were several incidents in the past with closed accounts. also they state, some customer accounts where closed by their banks after ther withdrew money from some exchange...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98434.0
(german)

anyone here ever had problems with their bank after a fiat money withdrawal?

It doesn't sound good. When it was a trading engine problem only, I was confident. Because it is now a legal issue with the banks I am afraid our money is going to be lost :S Of course, who is the beneficiary in this? Banks... they will run away with our money!

This is pretty much what I suspected.

It doesn't mean any euro deposits are lost from the bank accounts, it should all be safe.

But the questions that remain are

1. How long will the deposits remain inaccessible?

2. When will the exchange come back online?   Partly this depends on 1.

and

3.  What about the incorrect trades that occurred?

 :-\

@bitbadger

I think the incorrect trades that occured have all been successfully rolled back a long time ago. It's not that hard if he was keeping an appropiate log which it seems he was doing.

I'm not worried that our money will be forever trapped in a bank account. Surely that will be solved. I'm worried about our bitcoin deposits because the trading bug might've generated enough losses for the website so that Simon won't be able to cover them from his own pocket. I also see no updates on the steps he took to fix the trading engine. If the website opens again, I will gladly keep using it as long as the bug would be fixed.

my coins are still on a deposit address too  (didn't have the opportunity to trade on btc24) 
I think we will be the first to get our bitcoins back

It seems to be a big problem for Simon to make his businesses legal!
In Germany you can't do financial service (businesses ) without  authorisation from Bafin (Federal Financial Supervisory Authority) http://www.bafin.de/EN/Homepage/homepage_node.html

I guess, our money will not get lost, but I doubt that Simon will solve the legal issues quick! Simon seems to be a good guy, but he is also very young and naive (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98434.0) in that kind of businesses and laws!
The problem is not about matching engine I guess...

didn't know he run on donations. He could have advertized that more maybe.
Used the "same day" transfers , so he got share that way. Also am willing to lose another percent or so from my 5k if that's what it takes.

I don't understand these "eek I'm afraid I will not see my money again" comments.Please stop it. It's annoying and pathetic.
Some people give up surprisingly easily it seems.

Yes!
It seems, if we want help, we should find the reason about the action of the German government! And how to solve...

In the German forum Simon was wondering last year, why mtgox wants that customers do verification.
btc24EUR had 33,113,295.34 Trade Volume in last 30 days!
http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/btc24EUR_trades.html

The German government sure, wants to know something about, if there is money laundering...

I don't think the german authority has any jurisdiction over an english company... Let alone jurisdiction over the bank account in poland of an english company. IF the germans had any issues with money laundering they should have contacted the English authorities.

Maybe...
But Simon wrote: ". All we know is, that the German government asked for help from the Poland government, to close the Bank account in Poland. "

Be sure EVERY Bank has to inform authorities if millions of € going over your personal account within a month!


German authorities have power over his german back account, thats enough!

At this point, no one of us has to take legal actions 'cause police and tax authorities are already on his ass! He might be already in custody, and someone is posting with his nick predefined statements!

Think i'm gonna have a talk with a lawyer who is a retired bank manager  :-X

Simon might be waiting for his lawer to give him the 'ok' to communicate with us as i have read in his reddit lasts post.

Too soon?  ;D

http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=1526

The German government has jurisdiction over any company operating in Germany. It also has jurisdiction over banks and banking operations and conduct in Germany.

It doesn't matter where the company is registered. What matters is where the company operates from in practice.

This is not always easy to determine in practice. It depends on things such as where the business office (not the registered office) is based for managing and running the company on a day to day basis and sometimes also where any plant is based. It can also take into account where the revenue is banked. 

From what I gather of this situation, the bank accounts were/are in Poland and Germany, not in the UK. And it looks like the company is probably run from Germany, even if it is registered in UK.

So it is Poland and Germany who would have jurisdiction.

The bank accounts are also in his personal name, not the business's, and I believe he is a German citizen, not a UK citizen.

Really?

bitcoinica - lost funds - still in liquidation/lawsuit - deposits haven't seen a cent.
Crypto-X-Change - losts funds - operators AWOL - depositors haven't seen a cent.
bitfloor - lost funds - still operating - making slow repayment of lost funds (~3% so far IIRC)

Well the good news for creditors that makes his LTD worthless.  A court would find him personally liable for all losses and damages.  Then again who knows if he has any funds.  Hopefully his "lawyer" has informed him of complete personal liability (as in can lose everything he owns, personal assets, car, house, cash in bank, etc) and thus he is motivated to provide some transparency on what happens and what depositors can expect.

Rule No 1.

NEVER run any kind of currency exchange business using your own personal bank account.

And least of all one that requires compliance with anti money laundering regs and all the other requirements. Suicidal.

The amateurism involved in this operation amazes me.

To be clear, I don't know for sure about the Polish bank - the transfer I was looking at was sent after he'd switched the details on the website to point to his personal bank in Germany.  So it's possible that until that point he was using a business account.  I don't know exactly when he made the switch, it sounds like it was only a few days ago.

What really amazes me is how ignorant & naive the people trading there were (including me)!

Yes everything indicates the Polish bank was in the company name but it doesn't matter when he switched or why.  When his company bank account got shut down he should have stopped accepting deposits.  Period.  By using his personal account to accept funds in the company name he pierced the corporate veil. Hopefully this is a lesson to those getting started in business.

As bad as things got for bitcoin24 if he stopped trading when he realized a flaw in his trading engine and stopped accepting deposits when his bank account had gotten frozen the issue would be far less severe right now.  By continuing to operate with an engine that allowed double payments and rerouting massive flows of cash into his personal bank account he made a bad situation much worse.  Now it is unlikely everything will be resolved quickly and without cost.  Any cost and losses are going to fall on him personally so I hope he is independently wealthy. 

Yep, Im also guilty. I got the impression the operation was flying by the seat of it's pants, but I willingly shut one eye to it. And this is what happens.

if i knew that bitcoin24 is a "one person" firm  i would never deposit
when mtgox cool down for 12 hours, i wanted to sell 175 btc, before gox reopen and the rate goes down
i searched another exchange, found bitcoin24  with the highest EUR volume (after gox) with sepa deposit/withdrawal
i thought high volume  is enough to trust
i think not only me registered for this reason to sell some btc before gox reopen

i planned to spend this money within 6 weeks , but now i hope to get it back before August ,
perhaps only 50-80% but it is more than nothing  (if there is not enough btc,eur  cos of engine broken, we wont get back all our money)

Heh.  That's a lot easier than the insurance idea I thought of. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175123.msg1831121#msg1831121)  But I could probably earn more by doing the work than by simply placing a bet.

Yes polish Bank account was in the company name:
BTC24 Limited
IBAN PL18 1090 1115 0000 0001 2021 9027
BIC WBKPPLPP


Me too. And especially, if I found this German topic called Bitcoin and the banks!, which he opened on bitcointalk  -> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98434.0
He wrote about his bad experiences with banks. That they closed a lot of his bank accounts!!! Reading this posts after all this what happened, its so crazy. On November 02, 2012, post #79 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98434.msg1313812#msg1313812)

I try to translate:
He says: Postbank cancelled my account too. They say the same as the other banks say...
Slowly but steady I tried and "failed" every bank account in germany!
Will I ever get one again in germany? sorry, jokes aside.
Commerzbank and Norisbank I have'nt tried.
the polish account (Bank Zachodni WBK S.A.) is already above 500.000 EUR
and well. And it will be well furthermore... (VERY naive, oh ma god)
Bank Zachodni they are the best.

We are all very naive to give this very young guy thousands of our Euro!  ;D me too

German banks are crazy. They once refused to reactivate my account for a 15 Euro bill I had connected to my account and forgot about it. They went to Schufa and now there are shoot at sight orders on me.

the coins I had on btc24 were moved from my deposit address !!!!
any one else knows about this?

I knew bitcoin-24 was a one man operation. I also knew he had used his personal bank account before the polish one. I actually send fiat to his personal account when I started end 2012. I knew he was taking high risk. But the risk was the banking system, not him. Later on I noticed he had incorporated and a new bank account in Poland on that company's name so I thought that was a good way forward to professionalization. And now the corporate bank account got closed. Not his personal one, the one from the corporation.

So, I get the impression, what happened has nothing to do with the fact he started out using his personal bank account. It has to do with governments shutting down bank accounts used for bitcoin. ALM and stuff might certainly lower that risk, but not exclude it, as I think was shown by mtgox their bank accounts also being closed before. I don't think I took an unnecessary risk. The same can happen with mtgox tomorrow, again. Right?

DO NOT TRUST THE "ALPHA" OF BTC24

IT LOOKS LIKE SOMEONE TRYING TO SCAM PPL

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c7utl/bitcoin24com_the_polish_authority_closed_your_our/c9f9fcp

EDIT:

CHECK IF POSTET IN OTHER RELATED THREADS, IF NOT, DO SO

Thank you very much, Beutelschneider. I know you were willing to file a lawsuit, glad you changed your mind, for now, at least. Thank you for helping us all.

I'm don't work with computers really, so please could someone put my mind at rest about this URL - http://adminsimidi5544.bitcoin-24.com/


I entered my details here after someone posted it in another thread (or this one?). I'm sure it would have been flagged already - and I'm close to sure that the .bitcoin-24.com part of the address means it's still hosted in the same place as the real deal, BUT considering the rest of my tech knowledge I'd like to be reassured if possible... thanks and fingers crossed on the bitcoin24 headfuck adventure for all of us.  :-\

I just noticed he posted 3 Tweets @ https://twitter.com/Bitcoin24com, not that they're very informative ... But we'll see tomorrow...


As far as I can tell this is the real login page for the admin part of the site. I tried logging in there as well but it didn't work obviously.

The URL mentioned in the post points to this IP:

Base	Record    Pref    Name	IP-number	Reverse	Route	Autonomous System
bitcoin-24x.com	a	76.73.42.227 Denver, CO, United States	(none)	76.73.0.0/17 PNAP-DEN	AS30058 FDCSERVERS

(from http://ip.robtex.com/76.73.42.227.html)

If you agree, as I do, that bitcoin-24x.com is not a legitimate site, please report it to Google at http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/

let's hope the problem will resolve quickly. I don't think that bitcoin-24 was a scam, but it just wasn't well thought through technically and legally

As a german involved into this with about 30.000€ in withdrawal I have bad news for everyone.

First off, I am running a company since 4 years. We have had similar problems in the first, due to a high figure cashflow (not near the several million mark as BTC24, but close). The problem is not only criminal money, but also the taxes that not have been paid.

Yes, he has a company in UK. Yes, he said he pays taxes. But if you receive a single transaction above 10.000€ the BaFin (the bank supverision) will investigate and eventually involve the german tax authorities. This is where the problem really starts. When the german tax authorities start to investigate, they dont respect any customer rights.
Also, it seems like the BaFin requested the accounts to be closed. Or even the tax authorities, Hausdorf has not been very open about that. I dont think he does not want to be transparent with this, but that he simply has no clue. I have discussed this with our tax advisor and he told me some cruel storys.
For example has there been a Voucher Exchange based in UK operating in germany which has been closed without the funds ever being released again. The reason is simple:
You are laundering money. Yes, your money would be released if you could proof the tax authorities or the BaFin wrong. But the problem is: You simply cant.
To proof that you are not laundering money you need to provide personal details with proof for EVERY transaction on your bank account AND online transactions.

This is where the problem starts: How does Hausdorf proof that he is not cashing himself thousands of bitcoins out to different addresses? Right, he cant.

I do not believe in anything he says except the part with his bank accounts. And also there may be a lawyer involved, but he cant change anything.

This being said, I am very angry. I have only read all that scary stuff from him a few days ago.
He is being reckless with a lot of money and I hope he will rod in jail for that stupid shit he did. He as ZERO CLUE of what he has gotten into. For example did he post on reddit something about sueing german government for a compensation payment and to release a bonus to all users when that is over. NOT GONNA HAPPEN, DOUCHEBAG.

Yea, I'm angry that I lost 30k, still I am a stupid shit for not investigating before I deposited money.

Worst thing is: I am going to be one of the last ones to receive money. Because he is too stupid to increase daily transfer limit (for me its only a call to increase it to 500k or whatever, did it several times without problems, apparently he is not able to pick up the phone) he would take 3 days to transfer my money alone.
You dont have to be a genius that he will transfer all small payments first to increase good feedback.

If I ever see my money again I will be a happy man, but right now I am depressed.

The weekend is gone and we're all waiting for a promised statement from Simon. What I'd like to hear from him is:
- whether the bank issues will be solved or not, if yes, when should customers expect to be able to withdraw EUR/$ from their accounts
- how big was the impact of the trading engine error on the BTC amount available.  Were there any BTC losses (customers withdrawaing amounts resulted from double/triple trades), if so what would be the percent potentially affecting customers BTC balances?
- is there a solution to either of the two issues (banking/trading engine)?

"I wrote your name in the sky, but the wind blew it away. I wrote your name in the sand, but the waves washed it away. I wrote your name in my heart, and forever it will stay."

 ::)

Done. Advise everyone to do the same before people who did not see this wouldn't get them selves caught in even more shit.

strange. now it redirects to bitcoin-24.com

hy guys, fasten your seatbelts:
http://www.reddit.com/user/TAiS46

2. post

As I said above, that week will go by without any withdrawals. Then there will be a 3 month timeout and Hausdorf will go broke. Then there will be no lawyer anymore and we will have lost our money. Only way for him to solve this further is sell the bitcoins that we have deposited at Bitcoin 24.

lol, only way if money(eur) lost  that everybody gets only bitcoins,  but only 30%-60% of their balance (eur,btc, according rates)   ( to cover the eur loss and everybody get back some money in this case btc )    and after it you could withdraw your bitcoins to elsewhere

After all that Ive seen and experienced, I really don't have any appetite for any of these amateur hour "Bitcoin exchanges" anymore.

Unless or until an established Forex dealing business expands into the Bitcoin market I think I'd prefer to avoid the lot.

I'm not sure I fully understood what the "Germans" want from him. They want to close his business in order to reduce their bank's vulnerability? They just want him to return the stolen funds even though they were not stolen by him? What is he supposed to do during that 7 days time frame? Aren't other exchanges exposed to the same risks? And still no real updates on the trading engine errors and no ETA on site being operational again (at least the possibility of checking our balances).

I have the feeling the operator of this exchange is out of his depth with this business.

I hope at the very least he has a competent database admin and systems programmer to work alongside him, as well as competent legal advice regarding banking and currency exchange regulations.

You also need a skilled computer systems security specialist to keep a continuous eye on all the server security issues.

I wouldn't dare venture into such a business without having at least the above competencies to hand, it would just be inviting big problems sooner or later.

It's rather a German response to immediately start threatening legal action left right and centre when something goes wrong.."Sie werden von meinem Anwalt hoeren".

some more 'news'...

http://www.reddit.com/user/TAiS46

just an ETA would be nice... i just wanna check my funds...

This is looking more and more fishy. Random comments on twitter, not answering a question that has been asked 1000 times ("what about the BTC? Why do you keep talking about "bank accounts"?), updating via reddit..

It's just amateur hour that's all. Nothing fishy about amateur hour. Its what you expect.

This is either amateur hour or a scam. Have we seen anything that makes it improbable that this is a scam? Have we seen any statements from the banks/his lawyers whatever that verifies his story?
I'm not saying this is a scam, but I wouldn't actually be surprised if it turns out to be one, right now we would be in the" stalling" stage.

I don't understand the whole story! Wasn't it a German bank account? IBAN was starting with DE which stands for Germany!

if you look back through the threads on this forum it appears that there have been numerous problems with this exchange (as also with the others), and it's still around and he hasn't taken off yet with all the money.

If he did so it would be extremely foolish. And it's not difficult to trace people with internet and mobile phones etc so he wouldnt even get very far for very long. People leave their digital fingerprints all over the place nowadays.

So on balance I don't think there's anything shady going on. Just a heap of cock ups and a great pile of ****.

I think you are right bitbadger... why would someone leave his name and address, and even pictures of himself all over the internet if he wants to commit a scam...

I think/hope Simon is a sincere guy, but he's sitting on a huge pile of shit atm...

It would be nice though if he communicated more clearly en set an ETA for his exchange to reopen...

best regards,

Again, I'm not saying it is a scam, but him being known does not in any way exclude it being a scam. It wasn't exactly like Pirate's real identity and location was unknown, he even met with his pass through operators in Vegas, and posted a picture from the meeting! His name is well known , but he is still on the loose with no money recovered...

So no, that info does not in itself convince me that it's not a scam.

I guess we can see that the btc hasn't been moved yet (haven't checked it myself), but do we know that the fiat is still in the bank account, apart from him saying so?

I don't mean to be conspiratorial, but I don't see solid evidence that this is not a scam. Personally however I am very open to that this just is a major fuck up on his part.

You are turning the tables. Suggesting someone is scamming you need evidence first. Not the other way around. 'I can accuse or suggest he is scamming as long as my money is locked', is false and unjust to him.  


To me this looks like another major fuck up holdup by a government. Point the finger to the one locking your money. Not the one that is also a victim.

Given that we don't have anything to go by other than what Simon has said, we don't have any evidence one way or the other. That means we're stuck with trust as our guideline. And the communication from Simon hasn't really increased my trust in him, simple drops here and there, and not answering relevant questions (like why he hasn't released any of the btc yet, and why there has been recent movement from the hot wallet)

You are ignoring my argument.

It is very simple to know if it is true whether the government is holding up the money or it is Simon. Simply call the bank in question.

About releasing btc, if it is true that the trade engine went ballistic, as many have confirmed here, than he cannot release any btc before everything is reversed.

This logic is valid, even if he did not make a declaration confirming this is why he holds onto the coins, or moves coins around.


Don't get me wrong, anyone providing evidence that he is scamming I value highly. However, someone suggesting, implying or accusing him of scamming without providing evidence is acting unfair towards him I believe strongly.

I absolutely see your points. I guess our differences come down to how much we trust Simon based on his communication these last days. Anyway, hopefully we will know more in a couple of days.

It's not a governement that has locked my BTC away...
I'm not all that worried though, but some communication would be nice (well actually it feels like mandatory in a situation like this) and would hopefully calm people down a bit.

In the US we try to uphold the idea of "innocent until proven guilty". Is that the same for these forums?

(very different from "trustworthy until proven untrustworthy," though!)

I think that's beside the point. Pointing out possibility of a scam must be allowed before there is damning evidence available. Has it been proven that Pirate simply didn't lose all that money he owed?
Again, I'm not saying this is a scam, I'm saying events up until now are still very compatible with it being a scam. Some will think this is unfair to Simon, but until he starts to communicate for real or prove that some action is being taken, I reserve the right to be suspicious.

I did some transactions on btc24. This situation does not provide much trust for further business with this platform. Aside from that I was not alwas sure about the computations in btc24 - even I did never complain due to that only small values were affected.

My recommendation is to complete outstanding debits (with a lawyer if necessary) and to use different market places in future. Aside from trust worthy market MtGox a highly distributed solution is needed which can only be based on a 'everybody is a market place' paradigm. Personally I registered with localbitcoins.com (http://localbitcoins.com), which seems to be one of the best OTC solutions by now. There is space for a new paralleled and distributed service for the near future. -- if anyone with a profound technical knowledge base is interestet in specification and setup he may contact me.

Just adding some information I collected in various threads and on reddit:

Bitcoin24 is pretty much dead, mainly for the second of two problems:

1) The admin/owner TAiS46 does not seem to have the necessary experience to run a big trading platform. As evident from a few slightly worrying questions he asked in coding forums the last months, bitcoin24 was a bit of a learning-by-doing thing. As we all know due to a problem of the trading engine to deal with multiple requests of the same trade (that was already discussed on a php forum two months ago) too many BTCs were credited for a number of trades (the list can be found online), but to my best knowledge we dont know whether significant BTCs were removed by users exploiting that bug.
I personally think this is the reason TAis46 took the site down and he is now supposedly working on rolling back the double/triple/quadruple orders that happened (to his expense) and fixing the trade engine. He still has 16k+ bitcoins in his cold storage (1GcWYgqbdtzZAGsX2iSVBS74cPBiQjCiRg, 1AnixjBYxpTzAmfSa8kRdBiUaSGV2e9d26) and an unknown number in user deposit addresses I guess.
Whether he will pay that out or be able to is anyones guess, also see 2).

2) There are strict regulations in place for any bank/currency exchange/... operating in europe, to hinder money laundering:
- the operator has to identify every customer, e.g. mtgox verification before entering a significant (withdraw/deposit amount) business relationship
- any transactions above 15k euro, or even below if suspicious (e.g. anonymous savings account) has to be reported to the authorities
Hence bitcoin24, from the start, violated anti-money laundry regulations, probably strongly.
From a post on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/user/TAiS46 he still seems to think thats not his responsibility, but thats wrong and naive.
He even admits having had trouble with his german account from the start, as known stolen (phishing/hacked) accounts transfered money to his account, but despite that didnt think it through but instead just used a polish account.
bitcoin24 was very convenient for legitimate users, but for the same reasons the perfect money laundering tool. Considering his success, he managed to fly under the radar for quite some time, but that wont work infinitely (hindsight :( ).

Its not clear that the current legal trouble is due to accusations of money laundering, but it seems very likely. Either someone in administration noticed the amount of money going through his site and reopenend investigation, or the investigation was started by following the money that disappeared from known stolen bank accounts again. The german administration requested assistance from the polish, and they were just faster in freezing the account. The german account is on very low transaction limit, not completely frozen yet, but is expected to soon be (all according to TAiS46, and I think he might actually say the truth)
Due to being in violation of regulations from the start of bitcoin24, I dont see him having any chance in the legal battle, though :(

(edit: problems 1 and 2 are probably not directly connected, as he changed the account for international deposits the day before the site went down, but might be both connected to the preceding price boom)

The big question is I guess now whether the administration asks him to freeze bitcoin assets also, and if not, whether he'll actually be able to/allow withdrawal of BTC. The fiat is probably tied up in the legal battle for quite some time. Fines for money laundering (even if not that intentionally) can also be rather high (its not the US where a big bank had to pay a 1.9 billion dollar fine, but still).

In any case bitcoin24 is dead, the admin in deep trouble, what he will do with the BTC is anyones guess now.

TL;DR version:
bitcoin24 ran a multi-million euro business
-without anyone having the technical competence to run such a big platform
-without any legal advice
All else follows logically from these two.


P.S.: Hindsight is of course cheap :(

That sums it up pretty nicely. Cheers for the post.

In that case - good luck for all having some fund stuck in bitcoin-24.  :(

Nonsense innocent until proven guilty is just a quaint phrase and has no basis in law or in public opinion.  Governments routinely seize assets, put UNCONVICTED suspects in jail pending trial, wiretap phones, conduct surveilance, etc without anyone being convicted of anything.

The burden of proof for conviction is generally high but nobody is talking about a conviction here.  The operator's actions are highly questionable certainly rising to reasonable suspicion.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_suspicion

Thanks for that information. That is also what Ive been increasingly assuming over the last few days.

We don't know yet though how things will develop. He can probably get the exchange back online without too much hassle assuming he has people to help.

The problem with the bank accounts could be harder to crack. No useable bank account = no operating exchange possible. 

The only other alternative: pass the monies back to the customers.

But these options will only be possible if the account isnt permanently blocked because of the lack of proper bank compliance.

As for anyone suing him, that's completely useless in this situation.

If as seems the case, bank compliance regulations havent been followed and the bank suspects money laundering, they are bound by law to block business with the company or person concerned, and what's more, to report the matter to the authorities.

Trouble is when it comes to money laundering/money for terrorism suspicions, the authorities are paranoid and the standard procedure is to freeze all funds, so the innocent suffer as well as the guilty...

I only hope the outlook in reality is better than it looks right now.

just in case anyone is feeling shit about their situation:


I invested/speculated at $235, the night before my birthday.

I considered selling at $268 the next day, didn't... watched crash, Bitstamp went down, no sale went through until $125.

Watched it go up again to about $175.


Eventually after watching some sites and having a think, noticed coins going for $60 on Bitstamp and selling for €55 on Bitcoin-24... made purchase, transferred coins, made some money back (erm...)


The rest is history  :o

How many coins?

Good point on the "money for terrorism". I personally find it ridiculous that its attached to "money laundering/ ..." in every official instance (big fish and 99.9999% are still just illegal non-terrorist business id guess), but thats the state we are at :(, with all the resulting paranoia.

The problem for TAiS46 is probably that if there are even a few suspicious transactions (as the example he has given, money from hacked bank accounts being wired to his account to buy BTC), the only thing he can tell authorities is that his site made it disappear anonymously (not having used verification). So its hard to convince them he actually didnt have anything to do with it, and innocent until found guilty is a bit problematic in application if he is (probably) found in violation of regulations.

And yep, BTC wise, if he manages to sort out the multi-transactions (just some time/help) he should technically be able to send at least the majority of them back.

Quaint phrase?  Have a history lesson with Lysander Spooner: An Essay on the Trial By Jury (http://www.lysanderspooner.org/node/35)

6.37 at $235... so I guess not a lot by most of your standards.

BUT relatively speaking this was a fair chunk of money for me as I'm still a student.


I only have myself to blame but I thought it might be an interesting share for those who were a bit more careful with their money and still ended up in this situation.


It's all rather ridiculous really

Don't know if people are aware of this site, has some information about the situation with bitcoin24:

http://kuttler.eu/post/what-happened-bitcoin24/


EDIT: some further information to be found here: https://www.facebook.com/bitcoin.24/posts/622449231101962?comment_id=7172850

It rather corresponds with what darnth already said.

What I really hope right now is the following.

Simon has better legal resolution skills than Simon's programming and communication skills.

Of course, Simon in coupe with his lawyer and the rest of his team (about the first part).

I believe looking at the situation in a grim mood is not helping, so I try to keep positive.

has anyone mentioned the hotwallet activity last night?

it was funded (465 BTC) by 1EhyE3zD47RcCMvGRcEaw83G7qBF6wUT54:
https://blockchain.info/tx/4b1f4714ae21662f3cd7e6d03d3f1f4f94eeff3c6ef460a7536f006e7d320d1d

then cleared out again over the course of about a minute!

has anyone affected received any BTC from the hotwallet?


1EhyE3zD47RcCMvGRcEaw83G7qBF6wUT54 has previously sent BTC to the hotwallet:
https://blockchain.info/tx/fb422bd519657214dbc17c809e9736c2ce139534d92678bc6d12bb1d06756338
https://blockchain.info/tx/7c7402c8366d3024a5d5617462cc76a8d325cc3cefff9710c0ec3f01d69ab37b

and also one of the cold wallets
https://blockchain.info/tx/832b8ed1ec37bd02346e7fd8868e6fac8dd7f53781ef48343eac22e7c79fb38b

That is indeed very strange. I have a eye on all the wallets and I did not understand that move at all. All I can guess is that it was some kind of automatic payment, because of course there is now money paid out that was falsely created by the bug. Also 450 BTC is not a tiny sum of money... To be exact at that time it was 45.000$. Fucking bad move, simon. Fucking bad move.

yes i was under the assumption that the hotwallet would start paying out once it had funds (or a transaction from certain addresses?) but it's a bit disconcerting that there's been no announcement about it, and it's clearly going to need a LOT more input to clear all the pending withdrawals.

looks like the rollbacks have been done though:
so perhaps btc can start moving out?

The owner is on IRC right now answering questions.

Here is a log on Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cf6jy/update_bitcoin24_users_will_most_likely_be_able/

Mine too - though several hours later than yours. (I've read your post in the morning and back then my money were not moved yet.)

My funds were transferred to this address:
https://blockchain.info/address/1AnixjBYxpTzAmfSa8kRdBiUaSGV2e9d26

This is huge... Maybe this address collects all the funds deposited. "Total Received    393,790.81050737 BTC"

Something's happening...

that's the cold storage address, he keeps funds there for security and shifts them to the hot wallet (https://blockchain.info/address/1BTC24yVKQdQNAa4vX71xLUC5A8Za7Rr71) where they are sent out for withdrawals. the hotwallet is currently empty so no withdrawals can be made. but in that IRC log just posted he said he is aiming to bring the site back up in part with just a withdraw BTC function. perhaps he is consolidating all coins from various accounts into one place for now and will move funds into the hotwallet in preparation for the rush of withdrawals.

I believe people ask too many questions and don't provide enough information.  Simon is one guy, and I'm worried that important information he should know is getting lost among all the questions in his honest good faith efforts to do the right thing.  There are two important things that he might not know about:
1) Some transactions probably have put extra bitcoins into the hands of some dishonest members.  The status page currently says "All withdrawals will be gradually processed chronologically from another bank account." - which seems to apply only to fiat.  The same logic could be applied as a rough approximation of what should happen, but it would be better to identify and unwind duplicate trades - and even audit the last couple days of trades - before sending anyone bitcoin.
2) There is a phishing site trying to take advantage of our problems (the one with the same domain, but with the X at the end).

If anyone has proof that he's aware of these things, please share it.  If anyone shares my concern that he isn't, let's work together to make a highly visible single message rather than several individual attempts.  I suggest copying the link to this comment and labelling the link "2 things from Scotese".  Then he only has to read it once.

If anyone has a name he'd recognize and respect more than mine (he has no idea who I am), let me know and I'll edit this post to use your name instead so he's more likely to check it out.

see:



IRC LOG HERE:

http://area404.nl/irc/%23bitcoin24/2013-04-16.html


In the chat he says he has rolled back the transactions in the trading engine, and also says he will reset everyones password due to the phishing...


Shame that there isn't a clear cut solid single line of communication, but that's how it is...


things are looking better, not 100% positive but better - I won't summarise the IRC chat for you as it took me ages to read it but just expect developments in the next few days

A website has been set up as a central point to help people affected by the bitcoin24 closure.

I found this site via a link on the kuttler.eu site.

Far as I can see this appears to be a genuine self help site, not any phishing attempt, but use at your own risk.

http://btc24-help.com/

the site is in english and german.

It should be clear to everyone, but just to be sure:

do not email any user names or passwords, including on any screenshots or pdfs etc that you might send to anyone.

Also beware of shysters setting up bogus "bitcoin-24" sites which look the same but which have slightly different URL names, eg bitcoin24.co or bitcoin24x.com, bit-coin24.com, etc etc.

Before you enter any logins into any bitcoin24 type sites, check the URL address in the browser before doing so. Don't just look at the logos on the screen.

Simon should himself be warning people about this.

Also I think he should be putting his "updates"  on his bitcoin24 site and only on the bitcoin24 site, instead of scattered around on reddit or IRC.

All this stuff on reddit etc remains indexed by Google for posterity which isn't good for his business name.

If it was on his own site, he can delete it after the crisis (assuming there is an after...)

If they would post their own names and nicknames on btc24, reddit and here - at least that would be an indication that everything is real.

And best of all - if there would be an announcement topic here by a reputable user. Then all curtains would fall immediately.

But as of yet, I'm considering...

[00:38:40] <zewelor> TAiS46: what about transactions before turning off webist ? If i sold my btc there were sold or not ? I got 3x euro for that trade, does it mean i still have that bitcoins, or i have sold them and got correct euro amount ?
...
[00:39:34] <TAiS46> zewelor: they will be canceled and are restored.

So does this mean that I never really sold my BTCs?? And I will be able to withdraw bitcoins without worrying if the bank accounts will be unfrozen? What do you people understand?

(I am not zewelor btw)..

EDIT:

[00:40:36] <guidebook> TAiS46: I received a SEPA withdrawal confirmation email on April 4 but I haven't received the money. Is the money safe?
...
[00:42:19] <TAiS46> guidebook: the money is safe and I know wich transactions are not leaving the bank account! they will be reset!

Best thing of all would be proper announcements on the bitcoin24 site itself, not on all these other sites.

That would be the proper way to do it.

Hi
I can't understand 2 things:
1)What does the bank issue has to do with the trade engine bug....as I saw the site was put offline as soon (I hope the fastest possible) someone make the bug notice in the site chat but then the comes out the message informing us "The Polish authority closed our Bank account in Poland" "All funds are safe." etc. I mean no reference to the trade engine bug and if "all bitcoin" are safe....

2)why isn't given the possibility for those no have been effected by the trading engine bug (I figure and I hope there will be many! for example those not having made a trade let say from the day before) to bring the btc out of this shit....

To my best knowledge, the address for international deposits changed ~a day before the trading engine problem became obvious, so there isnt necessarily a direct connection. Both (bug becoming evident and administration starting investigation) might have be triggered by the large amount of transactions on the day of the boom, though.


Admin says he is working on that.

better an honest amateur than a stealing professional...

i got 70 btc on my btc24 account. i have the feeling it will be resolved. die hoffnung stirbt zuletzt... (hope dies at the very end only)

Hey guys,
are there any updates yet?

In this reddit post:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c7utl/bitcoin24com_the_polish_authority_closed_your_our/c9fu5yd?context=3

He wrote that the lawyer of Mt. Gox in Poland supports him. Can anybody confirm this?

anyone tried the site yet?   

I'm too uneducated to click on in case my computer blows up

(I do have adblocker, is that enough?)

I didn't see anything malicious.  It is a very basic site.  Has some info on the situation but not much.

If you are paranoid you should get the chrome extension "noscript" and "flashblock".  Run chrome in incognito mode, with adblock plus, noscript, and flashblock.  If you don't have java installed there isn't much chance of an attack vector. 

Still doubt you need it for this site just don't do anything foolish like give them your username.

This site isn't a scam.

cross posting on request of the OP


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=177494.0

I don't see any activity on this Bitcoin24 Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/bitcoin.24).  Is there another one?

No, This is the only one.

this is the only comment that has been made via the facebook

https://www.facebook.com/bitcoin.24/posts/622449231101962?comment_id=7172850&offset=0&total_comments=11


i think the OP of that thread possibly meant reddit instead of facebook. edit: there are apparently fb posts regarding this in german (which i can't read). he has been active(ish) there the last couple of days. i don't know why he doesn't post in this thread - he has an account on this forum.

Just curious: Have any of the involved other than Simon sufficiently confirmed Simon's story of parts of it?
Has for example, any of the lawyers confirmed that they are helping Simon and that his version of the story is correct?

Sorry if this has been done and I've missed it, but there's information on this issue all over the place and the only things I've seen so far is Simon himself giving out information.

The same old song. Does anyone believe they get the coins back?

This time there is also lot of fiat involved. Maybe we get them back but I dont have much hope.

You guys don't know how the german authorities work. Let me say it this way: Even if something they do is wrong, they do it right! Obey the rules, follow them, the spirit hasn't changed much in the last 75 years in some institutions!

Don't expect common sense from them! Prosecutors / state attorneys aren't really independent like in other countries, they might be bound to directives from ruling politicians! And the City of Bremen has about 16billions debt! I wouldn't wonder if they try to seizure as much as they can, dirty tricks included!

Hmm no coins have been released to depositors ....

when the kriminalpolizei says "money laundering" they mean DRUGS. when german authorities get involved be ready for an astonishing, unseen and unimaginable amount of incompetence and stubborness. also, they always think the worst of what people are up to. german authorities never trust their own citizens. so this may take a while.
 
when they believe its a money laundering setup for drug deals they will seize cash.

some german police officer might have googled "bitcoin" and found "silk road" and "bitcoin-24" and set off a stampede believing he´ll found something really big.

when german authorities get hold of the btc accounts at btc-24 they will surely try to put them in the garbage bin...  ;D ;D

Ok the impossibility to cash out, ok the impossibility to trade bitcoins, but AT LEAST should be given, and quickly, the possibility to transfer bitcoins elsewhere, I do not think all users have been affected by the trading engine bug, , wtf!

A bug? It's a well known trick!

Things will go very very bad for Simon very quickly if he does not refund the btc and communite about refunding the rest of our money. Unlike pirate he is also sitting on a large amount of Fiat, so not too long before Police and authorities are going to be involved.

lol, you wont get back your bitcoins / withdrawal wont work until bank account not released  by authority ,
cos if eur bank account never be unlocked  , then you get back only 30-80% of your bitcoins , other coins will cover the fiat loss, will go those who lost their fiat money

Your lol shows little empathy.

How do you know? Has this been confirmed by Simon?

I send a request to them not to release the coins yet as I have no coins there but euro. And I thought it was not fair that all loses would be carried by the euro holders, and none by the coin holders.

However, upon further thinking I thought it was also not fair to the coin holders that they should share in the losses of euro holders, since we all chose ourselves whether to trust the exchange with our euro's or our coins.

For example, let's say the exchange is hacked and coins are stolen. I would find it unfair that if I have no coins there and only euro, that part of my euro would be used to cover that loss, since I have consciously been smart never to leave coins at the exchange.

So I have send another email, saying, for me the coins can be released.

That's exactly what happened at Bitfloor. Bitcoin holders lost funds but the dollar holders did not.

Cri cri... cri cri... cri cri...  ::)

How is this all different from Cyprus? Bank/Exchange bankrupt because of money laundering / incompetence. Everybody loses money/bitcoins. Brave New Bitcoin World indeed.

I think you are missing the forrest from the trees. How about
4) The only possible reason for not allowing you to withdraw the BTC is he has no intention of ever giving you the BTC back.

Worrying about missing a price move seems kinda silly if you never get anything (at any price) back.

Bitcoin-24 doesn't have an insurance company with guns and thugs that force people to pay tribute to itself.

any news anyone?
I can feel my BTCs flying away...
They were moved 3 times from the deposit wallet
and gradually the amount decreases
 :'( :'( :'( :'( :'(

"4) The only possible reason for not allowing you to withdraw the BTC is he has no intention of ever giving you the BTC back."

Quoted as one of the smartest things said so far in this thread. And I did loose 120BTC @ bitcoin-24.com

hm ... i´m losing hope here....  where are the good news?

I expect Simon to provide information once a day.  Reddit is good tool for that because users can move things around with their voting so the most important stuff is easier to find.  I just do a search on TAis.  He has been providing information often enough for me, but I know how to find it (See previous sentence).

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c7utl/bitcoin24com_the_polish_authority_closed_your_our/c9fjrtj

I will only be posting more information to the other thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175123.0) because it identifies Simon and doesn't have as many useless messages.

If you have questions for Simon, I recommend posting them to Reddit, after you read all the other replies he has posted.  If he's smart he will ignore you when the answer is already there or at least it's easy enough to figure out.

Also, please remember that his English isn't awesome, so he might not understand your questions.

1. WHY IS HE NOT RESPONDING ?
2. WHY IS HE NOT RETURNING OUR BTC ?

RED FLAG!

BTC not returned has no connection to account being frozen. Incompetence or dishonesty?

Let me repeat that .I don't keep bitcoins in the platform .I said i was referring to fiat.
And the fact that a bullish dragonfly doji looks like forming on the daily chart
http://www.google.gr/imgres?imgurl=http://fxwords.com/images/words/bullish_dragonfly_doji.jpg&imgrefurl=http://fxwords.com/b/bullish-dragonfly-doji-candlestick.html&usg=__ijV5xBPF7T6jFinoi1VGqCwkHFY=&h=360&w=360&sz=34&hl=el&start=13&zoom=1&tbnid=hevXJ4Luu7BqkM:&tbnh=121&tbnw=121&ei=Z-VuUdvrPKmR7AaE5oGwAg&um=1&itbs=1&sa=X&ved=0CEIQrQMwDA

and i cant trade it cause i have no capital to enter, adds to frustration.Thats all
And guys  ...don't take this as financial advice and always trade with stop orders already placed in the platform

any updates?

To the above poster. By the time there is an update, you will become a hero member.

Simon Hausdorf, if you are reading this,

you urgently need to put an info page up on bitcoin-24.com to post updates.

You can't leave people in the dark like this for very long.

There are many people with substantial funds at stake in this matter.

It's also unprofessional leaving information scattered around on third-party sites, it creates a poor impression, plus it just feeds the rumour mill which helps no-one.

Simon, stell bitte eine richtige Infoseite zusammen auf bitcoin-24.com fuer Deine Updates.

Man darf nicht die Betroffenen nach dieser Weise einfach so im Dunkeln stehen lassen.

Viele Leute haben beachtliche Summen hier aufs Spiel.

Ausserdem ist es unprofessionell, Infos verstreut auf Sites von dritten zu schreiben, es schafft einen schlechten Eindruck und dreht die Geruechtemuehle nur weiter und das hilft niemandem.

Now Bitfloor exchange has also closed:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=179231.0

https://bitfloor.com/

looking at the list of threads on this site..  wallet thefts, security breaches, hacks, exchange closures.. 

bitcoin just seems to be one great hell of a mess right now.

You need to start dealing locally.

Ironically Bitfloor was instrumental to my localbitcoins.com selling strategy because they allowed me to quickly put the cash back to replenish the BTC I sold.

EDIT:

If you are reading this Simon, please update us ASAP. You are holding millions of our money, we at least deserve a daily update!

Right, but does the Dollar, Euro etc have all this.

You don't get mainstream banks endlessly reporting hacks and break ins.

The Bitcoin sector needs to sharpen up and get serious. All these cock ups just damage the chances of acceptance for Bitcoin amongst the general public.

The 8 year old does not have the self discipline, strength, or intelligence to hold a job.  He's only 8.  Bitcoin is younger than the 8 year old.  Gas-powered flight, refrigeration, indoor plumbing, and probably even the wheel itself must have had similar youths.

Be the hero you want to see in the world.  Run a bitcoin business that doesn't suffer from these problems.  I am, though it's young.  See "Meme Racing" in my signature.

I agree with you. But the way I see it Bitcoin is still the Wild West even today and sh*t happens. Bitcoin is still too small for the cockups of the last week to have any lasting affect on general public perception. These incidents will likely pass. More serious exchanges are coming in the near future (ie. Tradehill, CoinLab) to replace bitfloor and bitcoin24. I actually hope Simon will continue with Bitcoin24 2.0 having learned from his mistakes (I would continue using his exchange).

Wild West is a good description. But the cock ups are big for those of us directly affected by it. I hope this incident will "pass" ie that we get our money back.

All this having to chase down snippets of information on IRC, reddit and Fbook is rather like trying to find out the location of the next impromtu techno rave or something.  And because the info is not published on his own site no-one can be sure or not if it really is from him...

But then, the guy is a clubbing DJ...that's how things are done.

I don't think Simon intends to make another Bitcoin 24. I think he already has enough money.

I'm affected by it and I am not happy at all about it. Lucky I still have a good chunk of bitcoins in my cold wallet so it's not the end of the world for me, but it still sucks. I think Simon should update us ASAP as I am starting to lose patience with him and I am already considering LEGAL action against him if he doesn't update us soon. >:(

Indeed. We're talking as much as 10 MILLION EURO at stake here (€5.5 million in the banks and I'm guessing €4.5 million worth of bitcoins at current price). This would dwarf even the Pirate scam last year.

Mainstream banks generally wouldn't, would they? Moreover they have a great deal of experience and tremendous resources to protect their servers.


This I agree with. I get the impression exchanges are being started by enthusiasts with no experience in finance or banking and likely no business experience whatever.

Yes and just the sort of story the media like to get their teeth into. I think as the affected parties in this with so much at stake we're entitled to some proper information.

Quote from: TimJBenham on Today at 06:15:17 AM
Quote from: bitbadger on Today at 03:26:21 AM
The Bitcoin sector needs to sharpen up and get serious. All these cock ups just damage the chances of acceptance for Bitcoin amongst the general public.

This I agree with. I get the impression exchanges are being started by enthusiasts with no experience in finance or banking and likely no business experience whatever.


Your impression is correct.

One of the positive externalities of exchanges is a price. Without a generally accepted price dealing locally is more difficult to negotiate.

I believe, everyone is watching this - http://board.btc24-help.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=18&sid=2f0246177645f7231d00920b35baa876

here is an update from btc24-help.com

it is in german.
he is basically blaming the german authorities for the mess. he is not walking away, has no interest in all this money. he is getting scared by death threats. he will sue people that threaten his life.

Commerzbank / Statement
by TAiS46 » Thu Apr 18, 2013 12:25 am

Wir sind bereits einen kleinen Schritt weiter.
Das Größte Problem ist, das egal was ich veröffentliche, als "fake" dargetsellt wird.

Das, was ein sehr ernstes Thema ist, ist auf der anderen Seite irgendwie lächerlich!


Wieso war ein Konto bei der Commerzbank nötig?
Der Zahlungsanbieter Giropay, welchen ich zu Bitcoin-24 hinzu gefügt habe, weil es Probleme mit
Sofortüberweisung gab, forderte ein Deutsches Konto. Somit eröffnete ich ein Konto bei der Commerzbank.
Meine Beraterin bei der Kommerzbank wurde ausführlich darüber informiert, was ich vor habe
und wie viel Umsatz das Project erwirtschaften wird.
Somit was das Konto der Commerzbank, für das Anbieten von Giropay nötig.

Weswegen wurde das Konto in Polen gesperrt?
Das Konto in Polen wurde gesperrt, da die Kriminalpolizei in Bremen um Amtshilfe gebeten hat.
Es liegt, von den Polnischen behörden, nichts gegen mich in der hand, warum auch?
Die Polen haben einfach nur die Wörter "Geldwäsche und Terrorismusfinanzierung" gehört und haben mein Konto gesperrt.
Gegen die Sperrung wurde am 16.04. Einspruch eingelegt.

Was / wer steckt wirklich hinter dem ganzen und was sind die Gründe?
Der Grund ist ernst, genau so wie lächerlich! Es ist im prinzip so lächerlich, das es ggf.
die meisten für einen Scherz halten werden:
Die Commerzbank in Bremen hat der Kriminalpolizi in Bremen gemeldet, das ich des öfteren
über Bargeld verfüge. Die verfügung über Bargeld ist mein gutes Recht und ich denke Ihr wisst, das die jenigen,
die Bitcoin unterstüzten den Banken nicht wirklich trauen.
Die Bargeld verfügungen haben NICHTS mit den Einlagen der Kunden zu tun. Dies versichere ich!
Entweder es war der Gewinn durch die "Same-Day" Überweisungen, durch die Parcels oder durch die Spenden,
was abgehoben wurde.
Nun war es so, das auf das Konto der Commerzbank nur Zahlungen von Giropay eingelaufen sind.
Giropay Gelder wären als Geschäftlich gehandelt, ich habe mir dennoch den Gewinn von dem
Commerzbank Konto auszahlen lassen. Dies ist wie gesagt nicht verboten und mein gutes Recht.
Die Commerzbank wirft mir nun folgendes vor:
[...]Die von den Kunden zum Kauf bzw. Handel mit Bitcoins via "Giropay" auf sein Konto bei der Commerzbank Bremen überwiesenen und dort auch eingegangenen Geldbeträge beabsichtigt er bar zu verfügung und für eigene Zwecke zu verwenden.[...]

Dies stimmt jedoch in keinster Weise, denn auf der Commerzbank liegt AUCH ein großteil der Kundeneinlagen.
Die Commerzbank hat nun diese "Vorgehensweise" der Kriminalpolizei Bremen gemeldet, welche das Commerzbank Konto
gepfändet haben. Dies mit einem großteil der Kundeneinladen.

Wie sieht die aktuelle Situation aus?
Wie gesagt, gegen die Sperrung bei der Polnischen Bank wurde einspruch erhoben, das es kein Grund gab.
Gegen die Commerzbank wird ein Strafverfahren eröffnet, da durch die Commerzbank ein sehr großer Schaden entstanden ist.
1. Die Blockierung des Kontos in Polen 2. Die Blockierung des Kontos in Deutschland 3. die Handlungsunfähigkeit meinerseits, also Geschäftsführer der BTC24 Limited.


Leute, was denkt ich von mir? Das ich auf einer Insel bin, einen dicken Wagen fahre und mir ein schönes leben mache?
NEIN! Mein Leben ist genau so wie davor und ich werde sicherlich NICHTS mit den Einlagen der Kunden machen!
Klar, non-profit und so weiter! Aber die Same-Day Überweisungen, welche alleine schon ca. 20 Stück am Tag waren,
welche eine Gebühr von 1% Kosten, bringen mir genug Gewinn von der Plattform!

Ich wollte etwas schaffen, wo Leute mit Bitcoins handeln können. Dies habe ich geschafft. Dies wird mir jedoch kaputt gemacht,
dadurch das mir Konten gesperrt werden!
So leid es mir jedem tut, aber ich kann im Grunde genommen wirklich nichts dafür! Ich habe mit
zwei verschiedenen Konten gearbeitet, wo beide Banken wussten, was ich mache und welcher Umsatz
auf den Konten zu verzeichnen sein wird.
Trotz der ganzen Sachen wie "Wo ist Simon Hausdorf" werde ich mich nicht verkriechen und werde offen dazu stehen,
was passiert ist und was weiter passiert. Die Bedingung ist jedoch, das die Benutzer / Ihr mir glaubt.

Mal im ernst! Wenn ich euch (die Benutzer) verarscht hätte, warum schreibe ich dann hier und
bin nicht schon längst mit den 5 Millionen abgehauen? Ok, vielleicht weil ich nicht an das Geld ran komme,
aber das hätte ich doch schon viel früher machen können? Leute, das Geld juckt mich 0! Es steht
wirklich etwas anderes im Vordergrund.

Die Beamten interessiert nicht mal, das ich denen sage, das ich durch die Sperrung nun Handlungsunfähig bin,
und mit Sicherheit einige Klagen / Anzeigen auf die Firma zu kommen werden.
Klagen / Anzeigen heisst auch mehr Probleme für die Polizei / Staatsanwaltschaft.

Es wird einfach nicht verstanden, wie es möglich ist, in so kurzer Zeit, solch einen Hohen Umsatz zu generieren.
Das Geld liegt und lag schon immer auf den Konten und wurde NIE angefasst! Alle Zahlungen sind nachvollziehbar
und es gab keinerleit Probleme, jemals Auszahlungen zu bearbeiten, außer zum schluss hin,
was jedoch die o.g. Gründe hat!

Edit: Kleiner Hinweis, lasst so etwas sein mit den Gruppen bei Facebook.
1. Ist es Heuchelei
2. Verletzung von Copyright einiger Bilder
3. Stehen dort einige Drohungen
4. Gleicht es einer Hetzjadt / sowie Morddrohungen
5. Anzeige gegen Thomas Staegle wurde erstattet
TAiS46
 
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Apr 17, 2013 11:56 pm

https://bitcoin-24.com/

They don't even bother to translate it
Amateur time at its best
Google translation came up as this:
The reasons for the closing of our accounts with major international banks are now known to us and legally more than questionable. Our lawyers go before the full consequences to this behavior. We assume that we are ready again fully operational and all transactions can drive with even greater commitment on behalf of all users. The concerns of the major banks are us an additional incentive there! We will inform you promptly of further development.

Why does he post info in different channels (he used to post on Reddit)? Is it to confuse us?

He may say that he is not interested in the money, but until his word is backed up by someone else or we see som actions I remain very suspicious of him.

Edit:There seems to be a link to an official document on www.bitcoin24.com.

I couldn't understand the document, but, my suspicion of him just fell a little.

What the hell are you talking about? Police and authorities are already involved. Pirate was also sitting on a large amount of fiat. You just didn't know about it.

He always posts on different channels. It's like that running game hash house harriers where trail-setters run ahead scattering flour clues all around for the runners to try and find and follow.

But at least it seems that hopefully the http://board.btc24-help.com board will be used as the platform for announcements or future clues.

A club DJ turned foreign exchange/Bitcoin dealer with a buggy trading engine, who plans to invest money on an ice cream parlour in Berlin, with millions of Euros unavailable to the customers in frozen funds,  picture of him on the Twitter or Facebook with him wearing a carnival/party hat.. semi information and clues that may or may not be clues all over the place...

the whole thing would be hilarious if it wasn't so goddamn serious.

I agree. If things should work out (which I doubt) and money is returned and bitcoin24 v2.0 is launched, I for one wouldn't use it in a looong time.

From what I understood the German state attorney ordered the account freezing not because of bitcoin directly  but because they believe that the accounts got money from phishing scams. Apparently they think fiat money from phishing attacks (which they seem to think originated from Simon) landed on those bank accounts. Their only argument written in the document is a significant rise of incoming money in march (March, as in the beginning of the last rally).

Thanks! Well, if this is the reason for closing the account, at least the increased influx of money during the March rally could easily be explained. The question is whether the German authorities accept this explanation...

Is there any english translation yet?
If not I can try to do a quick one sometime this afternoon (if work allows).
[as its a bit of work just want to make sure I didnt overlook an existing one before starting]

here is the document.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2329063/Beschluss%20Scan_geschwaerzt.pdf

german aouthorities.... WE ARE LOST. they are the most uninformed, stubborn, incompetent lifeform on earth. we should sue THEM, not simon. yep, we should all sue the german authorities and banks who created this mess. after we are through with them they´d never touch btc accounts again.

ALL the action seems to be taking place at:

http://board.btc24-help.com

There is also an English subforum.

No answer there why BTC is still being held hostage.

the more i read all this, the more my money seems lost.
They will try to take all the euro they can to recover from their inability to put some strong security on there banking website...

Only lawyers might be able to get some money to pay themself out of this.

Ok, here we go.
Short warning, if you think Simons english is a bit incoherent, the German isnt really much better. Hes probably just really stressed out/on the edge and also not used to writing public announcements (no clear structure or consistent train of thought). My translation isnt very literal at places, as its easier for me to write semi-fine english sentences than to translate slightly garbled german literally into english. If the english is still garbled, its usually not my fault :D, but the german being sloppy/ambiguous.

Disclaimer: I ALSO DONT CLAIM ACCURACY OF THIS UNOFFICIAL TRANSLATION, of course. I am trying to be as accurate as possible, as some wording used is very sensitive to interpretation, but I am just some user trying to help, you know how to take that.


Personally I sort of believe Simon that its no scam, but I am not entirely sure whether his withdrawals from the account were legit and they DO accuse him of embezzlement. I am no expert on business practices and dont know exactly how the account was set up, so no idea whether the practices described by him are ok.

Yeah if he isn't up to a scam why not return the BTC.  In any exchange the BTC is roughly half of the clients assets.  Returning millions of EUR worth of BTC would likely be a massive sign of good faith.  The fact that in that long rambling nonsense (which really doesn't tell anything new that we didn't know on day0) he doesn't even mention BTC is very telling.

I mean he is holding tens of thousands of BTC.  People have pointed this out hundreds of times.  Every single response seems to not only not address it but actually just ignore it.  BTC? What BTC?

Also, on bitcoin24-help, an unofficial translation (by some other helpful user, thanks!) of a search warrant from the police can be found:
http://board.btc24-help.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=40

Very interesting, as is Simons post. It looks like they really think he would have run away with the fiat when the platform closed and accuse him of embezzlement.

Because then the state prosecutor could argue that withdrawing the btc means Simon tries to launder the money he got from the fictious fishing attack. Right now they only have the spike of incoming money as circumstantial evidence. If he would start transacting bitcoins now, that could obviously be seen as him hiding evidence.

Youre welcome!
Just thought, as people were repeatedly asking Simon to post in German before, as someone can surely quickly translate to result in something more legible than his english posts, that if there is no other someone in time, it might as well be me ;)

If the computer equipment has been seized by the police, then it may not be possible to return the BTC at this stage, unless there's a reliable backup somewhere else.

Personally I sort of believe Simon that its no scam, but I am not entirely sure whether his withdrawals from the account were legit and they DO accuse him of embezzlement. I am no expert on business practices and dont know exactly how the account was set up, so no idea whether the practices described by him are ok.

[/quote]
thanks a lot for the time and effort
[/quote]
All this scammer accusation stuff is just people's fears and imagination running wild.

Im pretty sure he is no scammer, he is just a "kid" who has unfortunately got himself and his business into one hell of a mess that he now has to try and get out of.

sure enough

http://sphotos-a.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/206179_10200315256874273_220580417_n.jpg

I have no evidence to suggest to me that anyone reading bitcoin24 or btc24-help dot com is NOT an idiot.  Why are these pages not on the bitcoin-24.com domain?  Sorry for calling you all idiots, but I think it's important to point out that no one has addressed this question.

My best guess is that over half of the people posting on this thread are attempting to exploit both bitcoin-24 and its customers.  Now is the time to do that because everyone is freaked out.  The other half just aren't asking the right questions.  WTF is wrong with you?

If someone can point out a legitimate reason for the alternate domain names, I will happily express shame and apologize.

One of th BTC24 users started the alternate site to coordinate and centralize communications and help efforts - it is not affiliate to BTC24 nor does it claim to.

Thanks alot Darnth - massive contribution from your part!

Ok, reading the scans of documents on bitcoin-24.com again (german), the legal situation looks a bit more complicated than just one accusation.

Money laundering:
According to the documents the bank where the German account is, Commerzbank, had asked the polish bank about a number of transactions.
These transaction were from german bank accounts that fell for fishing attacks and onto the Commerzbank account. Simon then transfered funds to his polish account.
On March 5th the polish bank answered a request regarding details of these transactions, a full months before the drama started.

On April 9th his polish account was frozen. I couldnt find the actual date when the german account was impounded, but April 9th is before the big market fluctuations and days before bitcoin24 went offline.

As a comment on this, according to European laws on money laundering (which are in effect in Germany) as Simon was operating a currency exchange he had to make sure that he can answer at any point questions regarding people having deposited money with him. This is the reason e.g. Mtgox has the requirement for ID verification before one can do substantial transactions in fiat.

According to the laws, if there is any money laundering going on (which Simon cant know as he doesnt have any dependable information on users identities) he makes himself an accomplice to the money laundering as he did not take sufficient measures to try to prevent it.
Converting fiat from phished accounts to bitcoin is money laundering, so some certainly happened.

Even an unwitting accomplice to money laundering, who frivolously failed to notice the money laundering (e.g. insufficient precautions) , can be sentenced to up to two years of prison time (!).

So in contrast to what Simon said a bit ago, he is certainly responsible, for operating a platform that could easily be used for money laundering.

Three days after the polish account was blocked (!) bitcoin24.com went down. During the big trading hype Simon already knew that his main business account is blocked.

Probably after the site went down another investigation was started, this time for fraud, accusing him of trying to run off with his customers money. This accusation seems to be at least partly based on his potentially careless and regular use of the Commerzbank account to withdraw cash, and also at least partly probably on his closing the platform and hence denying the users any access to their BTC and fiat.
Some news media report that he supposedly tried to withdraw a large amount from his Commerzbank account. That could be either:
- trying to run off with it or
- knowing that the account will be frozen soon (the polish one already was), trying to get some of his customers fiat to safety
Maybe the attempted big withdraw didnt happen at all, didnt find a good source.

The search warrant basically also states that they accuse him of, since sometime in March, not being willing and able to pay back all his customers deposits anymore.

The second accusation could be just a fuck-up of the way he dealt with the trading engine problem, though from reading his posts he might have been a bit careless in doing regular cash withdraws from the Commerzbank accounts (which doesnt really help to dissuade authorities from thinking about money laundering and/or fraud).

The first one is rather serious, as many people have noticed already, as he certainly did not operate bitcoin24 according to european regulations, and might thus be an unwitting accomplice to money laundering, which is still a very serious offense.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2329063/beschluss_durchsuchung_geschwaerzt.pdf


was this yet translated? in short it says his private and business rooms were searched for evidence regarding fraud.

i guess (dont know though) this means, hardware is confiscated. i hope the bitcoins are backuped elsewhere. else they will stay in some police-basement forever.

Unofficial translation (reasonably accurate) by someone is here:
http://board.btc24-help.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=40&sid=5b69645c5a11e0e013385920684f4080

And yes, looks like his private and business rooms where searched and anything of potential worth to get info (which usually includes computers) should have been confiscated.

The site was updated with some info.

I for one want him to try it.

+1  nice one, admittably

Ugh... the situation seems very bad. :( I see less and less chance that we'll get our BTC back, but I'm still hoping... That money could really change my life... :(

Someone said (can't quote, it was pages ago) he choose Bitcoin-24 when he got pissed off by Mt.Gox. Same to me. Bitcoin-24 really looked like a legitimate, quality trading site with a nice interface.


Also, since it had high volume, it seemed to be stable. I would have never expected it to lose my money. I can't even say that I (and others) were irresponsible or careless when they transferred funds there - or were we? I even did my research.

But then, no sites can be trusted... maybe not even Mt.Gox... If I ever get that money back, I'll store it in a paper wallet, and only expend it when I actually wanna use or trade it (even though, when there are quick moves in price, I won't be able to act quickly...). This is a HUGE problem that we can't trade bitcoins with trust.

I wish I wasn't pissed off on Mt.Gox so much and would have waited a few hours to make the decision to move to Bitcoin-24... And I shouldn't have moved ALL my Mt.Gox account balance to one place anyway...

the irony of that is that we the customers can't now get our deposits now because of this seizure of hardware and closure of bank accounts. Something that this seizure was apparently supposed to avoid!

So it's the banks and authorities and not Simon who are preventing us from doing what they accused Simon of preventing us from doing.

I wonder about this seizure of hardware... surely the hardware was installed in a secure area at a data centre, not located in his own business office? Couldn't be that easy to simply seize?

Depends. In retrospect it looks like Simon was running his business in violation of european regulations for the prevention of money lending (and financing of terrorism). As posted multiple times in this forum, running such an exchange he needs to verify the identity of at least significant customers (if not all) and needs to report any transactions above 15k euro as well as suspicious transactions at any volume (if someone withdraws 1000 euro 100 times or whatever). In addition he needs to be able to answer questions regarding who is the legal responsible for any customer account at any time.

With no ID verification in place, all of the above doesnt work. If any money laundering then happens (as it seems it did, e.g. from phished bank accounts), as he can not identify who did the trading the dirt sticks to him, as unwitting accomplice due to neglect of precautions.

Simon somehow managed to fly under the radar for some time, but this first set of accusations is already more then enough to close the business, impound all accounts and worst case sentence the manager to up to 2 years of jail time.

So it is certainly Simon's business practice and neglect that caused all this, and he is responsible for running bitcoin24 in an illegal way.

Blaming authorities or banks for closing down illegal business is a tad naive, sorry.


At least last year he seems to have had his stuff on virtual machinse on rented servers somewhere (evident from his him asking in a forum how to restore deleted files on such a virtual server, as he lost a bitcoin wallet to wiping one server without having backups last year).

How exactly everything is set up and whether it requires physical access to one of his own physical computers (for keys or whatever), no idea. Naively I would agree and say shouldn't be needed and thus hard to seize.

On the other hand if he allows any withdrawals, thats continued support of money laundering, as he still cannot identify customers of course. That would remove the "unwitting" from the accusation making it infinitely more serious.

We should also point out that in March/April there was a significant amount of people who send SEPA to bitcoin-24, but it never showed up in the account. So maybe the police is right with the "not willing to compensate users"-part.

All this speculating is sort of pointless, but completely understandable given the EPIC lack of information from Simon. I'm still willing to give it just a little more time IF he starts to comunicate some actual information rather than saying how he feels he is mistreated by the evil banking system.
If there is a reasonable reason why Simon cant pay back or let us withdraw our BTC, then he needs to comunicate that ASAP! Whining about customers who threaten with legal action or worse will not help him at all, and are just a consequence of him not comunicating whats going on in the first place.

I'm pretty certain "justice" will be served eventually anyway. Either we get our money/BTC back, or he will go to jail. I'd prefer the first option, but it's really up to Simon which way this ends...

Daily updates on bitcoin-24.com staitng the progress will suffice for my part not to take legal action. If the current lack of information continues I might give it another week or so...

I wouldn't feel myself any better if Simon would go to jail - it wouldn't give my BTC back. And anyway, I don't want him to go to jail, I'm not sure if he really deserves that. It wouldn't be "justice".

I just want my BTC back ASAP from anyone - whether Simon or the authorities give it back, I don't care. (Though I highly doubt the latter would happen, I don't think the authorities would care even the least for our BTC.)

+1! ::)

Speculation does not help and has never helped and never will!

I urge anyone who has Fiat or BTC stuck in Bitcoin-24 to head over to http://board.btc24-help.com to make a statement that we need regular updates and clear information. If not from him, then from his lawyer.

So far there is no official statement regarding the status of BTC holdings and why they cannot be withdrawn and if anything (hardware) was seized under whose control the BTC are right now.

Does Simon even follow that board?

As I said, I will personally give it a week or so. I've emailed him and thats enough (or should be at least). If somone from Germany would like to translate what I've written and post it on http://board.btc24-help.com feel free to do so. I've mined all my coins, so my situation is of course a bit different from someone who spent a lot of fiat for their BTC that is now locked away. I'm still pissed off though, but probably to a lesser degree than someon who payed more for their coins.

I agree there has to be evidence of movement in this matter. If there isn't then legal action against Simon & Co - and maybe some form of action or petition of the authorities involved - will be the only recourse we have left.

I am not prepared to sit back and twiddle my thumbs for weeks on end and maybe even longer while IRC chats and rumours go back and forth. That's not acceptable to me and probably also not to many other people.

Sure! He made a post there and he said this will his way of communication from now on.
German Source:
http://board.btc24-help.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=18
Also see the sceenshot within that thread.

Edit: The statement in the thread above has also been translated and posted in the English section of http://board.btc24-help.com/

From March!?!And what did these users do?Did they sent a message about the delay and if yes what did bitcoin-24 reply?
The German to English translation was referring to the Polish account being frozen from the beginnings of April.If this is the case then the fact that he didn't change the address for Sepa transactions makes me think:
1.Simon was indeed trying to gather as much money he could and run
2.Simon can't think straight enough to tell customers not to send money to a frozen account (i sent mine 4 days before the website went down)

I have 0 euros and 1.4 bitcoins now. Last week i started with 8000€ in bitcoins that i bought at 5€ each.
I am the one that was gox'd and then went to bitcoin-24.  Now i feel just like you with 0 money in my pocket and bitcoin price going up. That's why i'm starting to build a team and will try to create what i think an exchange should be. Fair prices, fair fees, 1000+ transactions per second, using sockets, i will speak with a lawyer and will have everything in order, and i will explain my business to the bank and cumpliment 1 by 1 every requirment they ask me for.  Fuck simon.

This is looking grim. Poor communication, refusal to take blame for what happened. Not returning BTC.

You're entitled to your oppinion ofcourse, but writing these kinds of messages (you've already conveyed your message multiple times in this thread) aren't really constructive to the thread.
Try to keep faith and think in solutions/actions we can take, rather than freaking out.

Edit: Just so you know, I have a 5-figure sum at stake here.

While the fiat holders are somehow protected by the authorities (even if it'd take a bit longer to recover them), the btc holders are not. There is NO excuse for holding the btc other than the intention to keep them. Since he failed at returning the btc as promised, he now aggravated the scam accusations placed on him and his scheme. Unfortunately, his time in prison (if any) won't return my btcs.

lol, i sold XY btc , (in 1 transaction), without any identity proof,   when gox was down,   so what do you think am i  fiat holder?  authorites know nothing about me, and from all others who deposited btc , and not via sepa

The most funniest way for the police to screw this up, would be if they return all fiat to the bank accounts it came from. Because that would not correspond to the btc/fiat they have in the account. Some would end up with double, some with nothing.

yes, as i said earlier nobody will get back their btc until eur accounts locked by the authority

I sent mine 1 hour before the site went down lol, 800euros down a black hole!

FUCKING DISASTER!!!!!! the only good is that at least the authorities are involved and not doing a pirate

The authorities closed Simon's little money laundering, because he had not a single verification procedure. Imagine all the money laundering after a successful phishing. His exchange grand them laundering in 5 mins. Register, use instant sofort banking or giro pay buy bitcoins, transfer. That was the main reason the price at btc24 was always way higher than the other exchanges.This is Simon's fault and he has to take some responsibility and not blame the banks, authorities, and customers.

Is he blaming the customers?

Given the latest statement he gave in German, I would say yes.

+1

what do we do? email confirmation with Bitcoin-24 and "withdrawal" screen shots from transactions from our other trading platform? Bitstamp has records of everything that goes in and out for you to look at...

I would say no, also based on his last declaration.

now that makes sense... I transferred bitcoins to sell to make extra money... buy at $60, sell at €55... no reason not to. Except for this shit now of course

can you give us a quote that supports that?

All I saw was a "guys I'm not going to run off with your money, what do you think of me" and "the guys who are threatening me will be dealt with" type comments... no blame on "customers" at all

so i guess we should start to sue.
If he had no legal statuts he is at least responsible for that. We are the victims here.
Not sure how to gather up and do something in germany. any idea?

Simon's operation was closed due to "suspicion of fraud" not ml,

" Ladies and Gentlemen,

regarding your question, I would like to inform that due www.bitcoins-24.de not the Bremen authorities, but law enforcement authorities in Berlin are responsible for the facts in the investigation. The investigation on suspicion of fraud will be conducted at the StA Berlin under number 241 Js 380/13.

I ask relevant questions thus jurisdictional convenience to be sent to the local authority in Berlin. "

therefore there maybe still a chance for fraud charges to be dropped and maybe continue the operation, or just let everybody get their money out.

why not, he's blamed everyone else (but himself)

narcissist psychopath

Hmm... It seems we are many, and some of us have high stakes, which provides great motivation to act to get the money back.

I'm not sure if Simon or the German authority is the bad guy here - probably both. Moreover, I don't know which of them is more prone to transfer our BTC back to us.

If German authorities recognize that Bitcoins are value, then there is hope they'll not confiscate them. Anyway, the German authorities could be sued if they don't give out our BTC. The most wealthy men could unite to put up such a great lawsuit that even stands a chance against the German authority. This is just my common sense speculation, but think about it!

i deposited bitcoin, never sold bitcoin, can't withdraw bitcoin. No bank was ever involved.

Yet somehow the banks are to blame and simon is jesus 2.0. Love the seized hardware rumour he's putting out so he can hold onto people's bitcoin. He can update his website but can't return bitcoin. hmmm

I'm 'lucky' in that I only deposited a small amount of bitcoin. Still annoying and hope he gets raped in prison.

it s not all about bitcoin. Euro should come back too in a reasonable timeframe. Otherwise i guess we can act.

You say that like money laundering is a bad thing.  ???

I think there are a lot of people interested in bitcoin who still fall prey to state propaganda.

Folks, entertain the theory that any good business that respects the privacy of its customers qualifies as an open door to "money laundering", and that the prevention of THEFT requires... Prevention!  (Not Catching the thief afterwards by trampling all over everyone else.)

The non-theft-related "laundering" of money (tax evasion and hiding the profits from businesses that are illegal) are actually very good for economies, and the government stance against them is oppressive and destructive. 

Austrian economics can demonstrate this, and if that interests you, check out The Ludwig von Mises Institute (http://mises.org).  If you'd like a more panoptic view, do a search for austrian bitcoin on your favorite search engine.  If the results don't make sense, try Google instead and ditch that other search engine to reduce your exposure to so much propaganda.

I have currently 30,000 EUR on Bitcoin 24, and would be happy to sue the German government now.
Let them seize the servers and let's do forensics on them to figure out what everybody's balance is.
After that, let's pay everyone.
Other people with big balance, let's make a group and go directly to the German government.

I understand you are angry. And it's justified to feel angry. However, wishing Simon gets imprisoned and raped is just disgusting of you.

+1

...is there some better way to do "plus one" replies?

+1

:)

+1 (x2) I think we need a system to rate posts here, and I agree wishing Simon gets imprisoned and raped is just disgusting.

+1 from me :)

I liked very much that Simon did not do the whole identity/NYC thing.

I knew that was risky of him though.

But now I realize it was risky of me :/

Still I'm not 100% convinced that is what brought it down since mtgox and bitfloor also had their accounts closed, even with NYC if I understand correctly.

But, yeah, here it seems worse, not just closed account but frozen.

The cash withdrawals weren't wise of him to do as it makes you 'suspicious', but I do that too with my bank.

Makes me realize I need to become a lot more careful. When dealing with exchanges, and when dealing with my bank.

This certainly has been a lesson for me. Not sure if I will ever cash out bitcoins again.

From a victim of "misunderstanding" regarding money laundering, Simon now turned into a scammer of almost 30k btc. He could've done at least some symbolic steps to show his intention of returning the btc, such as opening a page showing account balances and the possibility of his customers to initiate a withdrawal request, even if only to keep records of it.

I am really curious how many pages this topic will reach....

+1

A page to check balances would be really a good gesture, and more frequent communication.

Agreed; is Simon currently in custody or something? The deafening silence doesn't bode very well...

Nope. Some people had contact with him over the last two days.

You can the last posts here: http://board.btc24-help.com/

Anyone who thinks a Bitcoin exchange which allows you to make transactions without verifying your identity isn't at high risk of having their bank accounts closed without notice and being reported to authorities for possible money laundering activity is displaying an astonishing amount of wilful ignorance. 

Let's not pretend that people are unaware of the risk they're taking when using such services - they're just hoping they'll get their funds out before those services come under scrutiny.

If you've got significant funds on Bitcoin-24, be prepared to prove that you acquired them legitimately.

Read these 2 threads...



http://board.btc24-help.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=81&sid=76ce23edbb991e13c2eb416231dcfd5f


http://board.btc24-help.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=82&sid=28cfe5634e3a59f7c5c6fb4960c60ef9

pff I'm starting to loose hope that I will see my BTC's back  :-[

waiting for 3500€ to be paid out.
is there a mailing list of victims or shall we set up a site?
we definitely should combine our forces.
it even could help Simon by showing the authorities we aren't criminals, that do money laundering.

There is already a board set up for the victims to hold together: http://board.btc24-help.com/ - no need for any new site. Though it's a little messy at the moment, it'll be cleaned soon, hopefully.

Nope. There was an older investigation, under number 290 JS 47630/12, that was actually the cause for freezing and impounding his accounts. It had gone on for some time already (at least early March) and was for suspicion of money laundering.

The 241 Js 380/13 fraud cause started much later, probably after bitcoin24 was closed by Simon. Both investigations are now bundled in Berlin, so its correct that Bremen authorities dont have anything to do with it anymore.

I had posted a rough estimate of the timeline earlier (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=174600.msg1877068#msg1877068).

If you're an EU resident, this doc will give you some insight about the (real) ways and means to get your money back:
http://ec.europa.eu/civiljustice/publications/docs/guide_litiges_civils_transfrontaliers_en.pdf (http://ec.europa.eu/civiljustice/publications/docs/guide_litiges_civils_transfrontaliers_en.pdf)

"We" should?

this is the path i gonna take personally. I have time and money, i hate unprofessional poeple, i do not care so much of my 2700 euro, i just care on suing. Also Always wanted to visit varsovie.

step 1 gather information on how to prosecute in eu.
step 2 gather other europeans
step 3 go to see the police.

Seems like a clear path and i don't give a shit about what they say anymore.
I'm sick of those "i look professional" business that do not help bitcoin. I have to go seek every single piece of information? Not ANY mail?

I hear you man. Also did not receive a single email from them. That's VERY unprofessional.

I hope you don't file another lawsuit against them though as I think that just lowers my chances to see my money again.

Publication in the Bundesanzeiger

The Bundesanzeiger publishes a document [1] from the Berlin prosecution office. The document confirms that around 2.5 Million Euro were confiscated. It says that the confiscation and it's publication enables Tatverletzte (victims basically) to claim their funds through the legal system, which the prosecutor "strongly recommends". This can of course cost money, and there's no guarantee to get your money anyway. And the document speaks of a time limit, creating a sense of urgency.

This Document speaks of victims, when there was no conviction or even indictment yet. The presumption of innocence goes right out the window.

We don't know if there was any fraud and if bitcoin24 will be able to reinstate their services.

But people with a significant investment in bitcoin24 might see that differently. Bitcoin24 still hasn't published anything trustworthy that confirms that all the customer funds can be repaid. An affidavit comes to mind.

Basically it means customer funds are gone. How many are going to fight in court for the money?

here it is
https://www.bundesanzeiger.de/ebanzwww/wexsservlet?session.sessionid=177f1349e818404e843a1aa94d580597&page.navid=detailsearchlisttodetailsearchdetail&fts_search_list.selected=88a9d5e82d42f197&fts_search_list.destHistoryId=00202


basically its telling: the prosecutors have secured the money of the german bank account. it stays with the prosecutor until the procedure is finished. it can only be withdrawn by the owners by filing a civil lawsuit in germany.

before anyone is sueing btc24 i would recommend to first claim your money at btc 24 lawyer. if they dont react properly you can still file a lawsuit. btc 24 owner simon hausdorf/his lawyer mr röhl do not even know of exactly what is the accusation. they have not received the prosecutors files yet. it is way to early to conclude that a crime really happened. check out this thread first:

http://board.btc24-help.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=141

 

It would be hilarious, if no one claims funds, because no one was a victim. Then the police would look stupid.

But it would also be hilarious, if people will just claim funds, because the police shut down the website. Then it would become a self fulfilling prophecy.

Caution! I did not say that for claiming the money Hausdorf has to be sued. check with your german lawyer first! maybe one has to file a claim against the state of germany to get the money - those procedures of "secured funds" differ from country to country.

I'm commenting on something mentioned earlier in the thread:


First off: The prosectutor in any jurisdiction usually is pretty well paid, and he's also on top of the 'power structure', which means basically he's the biggest dog in the yard, and can do whatever he feels like. He/it has no incentive to 'play nice' or to 'care for customers' in any cases whatsoever. This is the current system we're dealing with. As a matter of fact, anybody can become victim to confiscation of funds, if some entity in power decides that something must be investigated. It need not even be a legit case, but heck - we keep all those millions of euros frozen 'just in case'. Basically forcing everybody involved to follow the will of the prosecutor. In such a system there's no freedom. Freedom is when you can manage and control your own money, and have nobody confiscate them.

That's where bitcoin is great. Now, there's probably a lot of small time investors that had money in bitcoin-24.com, and the prosecutors are telling these people to file a law suit ? Basically, if you're owed 500 EUR, then only visiting a lawyers office are probably going to set you back the same amount.

In reality the 'it can only be withdrawn by the owners by filing a civil lawsuit in germany' is extortion. It's the biggest bully in the schoolyard saying, yeah - you can have your candy if you pay me 100 dollars, then holding the candy up high out of reach asking for an amount that no kid can pay.

From the looks of it, it appears to me that Simon got in deep without the proper paperwork, and now he's inside the bureacracy machine, that will just do it's work, and they (prosecutor) can basically do anything they want, and more often than not - they say they do something because of a certain reason, while the true reason is something else entirely. And more often than not, even if there's been no crime - they (the prosecutor) will still be able to find something to charge you for.

I would advise everyone to accept bitcoins for work they do, and use bitcoins online and in brick and mortar stores, and using the traditional banking system as little as possible. Eventually, if enough people do this, we will have a real impact, and we will be helping Satoshi reaching his original goal.

I would've loved to see the attack on any bank that for no apparent reason shut down the bank accounts of high profile politicians, or the son or the daughter or the prosecutor himself. I can't see any prosecutor accepting something like that..

It's all about being the biggest dog, and at the moment, we're feeding the biggest dog.

nice post. that is a good analysis.
 ;)

Can anyone do a tldr of the post quoted above?

Are you THAT lazy ?

No bitcoins will be returned.

why not?

I think the better questions is ... why would he?

I got such impression after reading the post.

Actually, the last communication is that Bitcoins can and will be returned, while the main problem is with the frozen bank accounts.
Previously it seemed BTC can't be returned because of the investigation - hearing the opposite is good news for BTC owners.
But... I believe it when my BTC will be successfully withdrawn with 6+ confirmations...
But certainly, it seems now there is hope!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2329063/Stellungnahme_26.04.2013.pdf

monday??

the announcement of the prosecutor only talks about money, not bitcoins, so maybe, bitcoins are not confiscated.

Not maybe. According to the document linked by 600watt, the bitcoins are not confiscated. This is an official statement from Simon's lawyer, so we can take it granted... Now, let's wait to get out BTC back! :)

Now if it still won't happen, we'll have no doubt of Simon's bad faith.

AFAIK, the bitcoins will be able to be returned by introducing a limited feature for withdrawals on the bitcoin-24.com site. Call the lawyers to get more details if required, that's what I've read.

i hope btc wont be released
yes, you get back all your bitcoins and who has fiat at that point when the site was closed get back nothing  
( 1 hour later or earlier perhaps you had only fiat and not others)
0 % vs 100%  are you serious  ?     i read somebody has more than 30.000EUR ,
i think if btc will release and fiat lost,  and if i have so much money lost, manhunt is a real choice  not to share the lost beetween of all customers  

and of course if i have so much fiat, i am going to write emails to the site owner, not to release btc, and share the lost, if he wants to live a normal life (everybody knows his identity now, town where he lives, etc. )   so i am sure btc wont be released after a dozen of such emails

authority cant protect the site owner from such threat , cos there was no identity verification for site user,  and emails could send via proxy , etc.

Personally, I'd feel it unfair if a portion of my bitcoins would have taken to compensate those who lost fiat, because I didn't even trade on the site. Maybe if I was actually using the site, I'd think differently, but that I deposited BTC hours before the site closed doesn't make me feel part of it enough to be willing to share losses.

you deposited to the site to trade it within 0.5 - 4 hours , if not then you are crazy to deposit and parking your btc at an exchange
so if the site was closed after 4 hours after you traded and had no btc i think you would change your mind  

so it is bullshit to name a specified time when the site was closed and   you get back all btc 100% and all fiat lost

I just registered and made my very first deposit on the site. I did't even use the fucking site previously.

BTC Withdrawals will be enabled on 28. April before 18:00 GTM +2
We had some technical issues.

news ;-) https://bitcoin-24.com/

Mega brutal indeed.

if you get back all your btc, while me and others lost all our fiat,
i will do everything to make the site owner life hard not to share the lost beetween customers
(if the site was closed some hours earlier i would have only btc at my account or at my wallet,  i made only 1 trade from btc to fiat)

where are the fiat owners?  

Prosecutor already made side owners life hard

Just out of curiosity, giving the history of a lot of bitcoin exchanges, did you do any research prior to depositing the money ? Not trying to be a smartass, just asking ?

I've got just as much sympathy with you as the next guy (meaning that this shouldn't happen and that it sucks).

It was the second biggest after Mt. Gox in terms of volume being traded. I (we all, probably) assumed everyone else did the research and that's why there were so many people trading there  ;)

The problem with trading bitcoins is that if you really do your due diligence properly, then you've got nowhere to go.

I guess you could say the same thing about fiat banks. :D

Some good news at least from Bitcoin-24.com

According to a notice on the website:

BTC Withdrawals will be enabled on 28. April before 18:00 GTM +2
We had some technical issues.

HEY! BTC withdrawals ARE ENABLED NOW! \o/

Lucky you, just a mean tease for the FIAT holders. I can login and see my FIAT amount but do nothing with it. Pf.

yeah, btc holders win twice
when the site was closed btc was about 50-60 EUR , now 105 , so  value doubled
while fiat holders could not buy btc at low price and perhaps all fiat will be lost  ,
so not only 100% vs 0%  btc/ fiat, insted 200% vs 0%

nice, i can congratulate for this to the site owner

Good :)

Post here once your btc appear. Im waiting now.

Indeed...

 So, the german authorities have frozen fiat account in order to investigate a suspected money laundering.
Doing that, they've left the owner organize a massive and very effective escape of this laundered  (bitcoined) money.

If I have not some fiat frozen in this shit, I would lol much more.
But lol anyway...

I'm a fiat only holder there. I can say I'm really happy to see my fiat balance again, eventhough it's frozen. Taken a screenshot now ;)

I think it's a big step forward. I'm very happy for the btc people they have their bitcoins back.

I hope it will all end well for the fiat holders too.

Is there actually any evidence that Simon has done anything wrong ? Should not specific accounts be targeted if the govt. suspected money laundering. Since they're the biggest bully in the schoolyard, they do as they please anyway.

Now, if just every customer of Bitcoin-24 got together and organized a protest against the Govt, that would spur some interest, for inctance have a few thousand of the customers wave flags outside the prosecutors office, showing him that there's real people, living real lifes, having real assets frozen. As long as there's no opposition, nothing happens. What the Prosecutors office are doing at the moment is theft. They're taking the money of ordinary citizens and holding it hostage. They're relying on all of the customers to be fearful of the prosecutor.

Good idea. I hate having to do this, but I will. Send me pm if you decide to organise this.

It's just on an idea level for me - I'm not affected as I never put anything inside bitcoin-24, and I don't even live in Germany. But if somebody chose to organize it and show their dismay with the prosector, I'm sure that it would get news coverage.

And this is exactly why he could have easily refunded everybody instead of letting FIAT holders potentially lose all their investment. Seeing as bitcoin has doubled in value, for people who were probably gonna panic sell their coins at that moment anyway, it could have been a win win and everybody would have had their investments back.

Too bad he didn't think that way, and too bad the bitcoin holders of course, will argue, that they didn't have their bitcoins there to sell them so they would have probably held them anyway. Yeah right. Human greed. The world is never fair eh ;-)

+ 1

i thought all through this matter, that simon was no scammer. how many of those epic btc related fuck-ups turned out to be carried out by such a genuine guy. the reason the fiat clients of simon have their fiat frozen is not that he was a scammer, it is because commerzbank of germany and some police and some berlin prosecutor were to paranoid/eager. simon is a hero. blame the german authorities.

Would it be possible to file a lawsuit against the German government because of this, seeking payment for all the grief and problems this has caused for thousands of customers ? Or should it just be, after say 2 years and the authorities find that, oh - sorry there wasn't any problems anyway, here's the money back (if that happens), no consequences for the authorities ?

The only reason the authorites can act as a bully is because the people let them do so.

+1

Couldn't agree more. I had sold BTC the day before the site went down, expecting to be able to buy back lower. The site closed just 2 hours before the crash to my buy price target of 40-50 EUR. In other words, had the site remained open for just 2 hours longer, I would have BTC (bought for less than half the current price) in my account instead of fiat, while many of those with BTC would have probably ended up with fiat after panic selling on the dip.

The fiat holders are certainly the ones left holding the bag in this case and we could be waiting a while to get our money back. Getting back less than what I'm owed or possibly nothing at all will only add insult to injury >:(

I have some fiat money in the bitcoin-24 account, but just 4 days before the site went down, I sent a slightly bigger sum, and those money are not visible in my account. Where are those money ? Can I perform a charge back with my bank ? Since the money never arrived in my bitcoin-24 account ?

Is there anyone else in the same situation ?

My BTC balance appears correct. I requested a withdraw yesterday but its yet to arrive. Has anyone received theirs yet?
My fiat balance is only showing a tiny fraction of what should be on there. There is also no sign of the fiat withdraws I had pending, but I guess thats to be expected.

You are suggesting Simon should have sent me only half the BTC I had on there? Where is the logic in that? Your assumption that I would have panic sold these anyway makes no sense, like many others I was buying coins. Refunding the BTC because he can, and not yet refunding the fiat because he cant, makes sense. Your solution does not. For the record I had about 50/50 in BTC and fiat on there.

But what worries me more is that there is still no word on the trading engine bug, no sign of any rolled back transactions.  How is he going to do that after he refunded the BTC?

No coins arrived as of now. Its close to 18h now.

relax, looks like he's doing as he told:

https://blockchain.info/de/address/1BTC24yVKQdQNAa4vX71xLUC5A8Za7Rr71

Simon for President !!!

In fact, the buggy transaction have been rolled back,  if they were in your favor  ;D

The sell order of my last 0.10btc, which was replicated 3 times,  had given me a(non legit) bonus of ~20€ in my fiat balance until the site eventually died minutes later.
As expected, this bonus has now disapeared from my fiat balance, and the 0.1 btc were back.

What I didn't expect was to lose all my legit fiat before I can buy back btc  :'(

Nice to see the address is nearly empty now... hope he gets to my transaction before it dries up!

I put in the request immediately after the site opened for withdrawals. Haven't seen anything yet. My balance on the site has been updated to reflect my post-withdrawal amount, but I never received an e-mail confirmation. I hope he has a record of it!   :-[

https://blockchain.info/de/address/1AnixjBYxpTzAmfSa8kRdBiUaSGV2e9d26 (https://blockchain.info/de/address/1AnixjBYxpTzAmfSa8kRdBiUaSGV2e9d26)

Cold storage is far from empty  ;)

No btc yet. Close to 21 hrs.

btc arrived. still shiny, no rust or spiderwebs

Whew!

I'm glad 600watt got his.

I'm at 21 hr, should be coming soon I hope!

24 hrs up. no btc yet. What to make of it? Why make false promises?

f..ker   btc24-help.com admin  do not activate my account for 2 days , nice

just logged in and i have negative BTC funds and fewer euros than i should have. nice work simon...

Took a little longer than 24 hours, but just received my bitcoins intact from bitcoin-24.com. Euro deposits however still sitting there.

i got mine back:: https://blockchain.info/tx/1b6adfa4777c47c152e6e8b3a0b19240a7a3d3745e3cd1613736c4dd957ba38c

GOD BLESS SIMON !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Please consider a donation to bitcoin-24.

Happy for you :)

sure!

I'd like Simon's face on next edition of cascascius bitcoin, he really deserve it.

Unbelievable! Bitcoins have arrived. I am speechless.

An experience I will never forget.

bitcoin-24  please send out a press release or contact me and I'll do it for you.  This is good news people need to hear about.

My bitcoins are back!!! Thanks Simon!  ;D ;D ;D

The transaction formy BTC was received on blockchain.info an hour and 15 minutes ago and has a 0.0005 BTC fee, but 6 blocks have been solved without any of them containing the transaction.  I guess Simon's client has yet to re-broadcast it since 50BTC didn't pick it up the first time.

I had exactly the same situation. I did an official funds transfer recall due to technical reason (there are only three possibilities: technical, fraud and double payment or something... I thought technical was the right one as the exchange was not operational any more) at my bank but Simon's bank refused to go through with it. All they said was "Rejected due to legal reasons!". So, I think there is nothing I can do without involving my layer but that would imply accusing Simon of fraud which is not what happened in my opinion.

At least people are getting their BTC back so it seems Simon is trying to do what he can.

I believe psychopathic banking cartel will fight the future with all means available, but ultimately they will go the way music and movies industry went...

By now i strongly recommend do not claim anything through a lawyer! Simons lawyers are working to release the fiat currencies now, but give them some time. It's almost weekend here in germany due to that holiday tomorrow, so don't expect anything before the next week! State prosecutors still hold their hands upon the seized accounts, getting your lawyer involved now won't speed up anything!

Its highly likely you will have to identify yourself before you can withdraw your fiat so the state prosecutors see this isn't a big money laudering machine and the majority of the users are honest ppl.

Don't worry. Maybe I wasn't clear but I have no intention of suing Simon.

I am in same situation as somebody mentioned a bit higher - I sent money to german account (first BTC purchase), then the next day site went down .... bad luck :(
And now I don't see it in my account, I have zero balance there.

I've not lost much, though missing the ~ 50 EUR/BTC opportunities to buy BTC while it was cheap (as the whole exchange was offline) sort of annoys me more than the financial loss.

I guess all those late payments were never processed, so perhaps once (if) the money gets back into Simon's hands, perhaps he can just sent those unprocessed payments back to whatever account they came from without actually trying to find out which site account they were intended for.

As for starting to return all BTC's - I see this as a bit double edged move - it will surely please BTC holders and return some level of trust, but in the end can be quite risky and (especially by fiat holders) seen as "prefferring some of the creditors", which is probably a criminal offense by german law (I don't know it in detail, but I guess this would be similar in most of the EU) if the thing would end up by EUR being lost and the prosecutor would prove that Simon knew/should have known/should have suspected that the EUR would be lost.

But I hope Simon knows what he is doing, so perhaps there is some chance to get the EUR back at some day ....

No he doesn't. And that's why the trouble came in the first place. Now, if he can have a team assist him, that's another matter entirely. I haven't looked deep into it, but I think there's some license requirements set forth by Bafin (Federal Financial Supervisory Authority), as to my knowledge, bitcoins are classified as some kind of foreign currency.  To get such a license, I think the only smart thing is to lawyer up, so you have some bulldozers (legal suits) that can plough their way through the German bureaucracy. Doing something like that alone for an inexperienced guy - not going to happen.

I cross my fingers and hope for the best for everyone involved. Personally I don't have anything at stake, but I think it's a shame for the bitcoin community that this is happening.

I hope it resumes trading  :'(

I've thought that bitcoin is officially classified as a commodity (i.e. like gold, wheat, petrol, ....) and not as a currency (but traders in commodities still need to meet some criteria, though not as strict as a bank license), but I guess that formal classification of bitcoin may differ from country to country.

As for resuming the trading - I guess Simon's reputation god pretty badly damaged by the bugs in the trading engine, so I fear many people would just pull out the money once they get the chance and seek some other exchange for further trading (without bugs :).

I agree with this. Running a Bitcoin exchange is like setting up shop in the middle of a mine field right now. All the anti-money laundering laws and terrorism financing paranoia, plus the government and banking cartel hostility to Bitcoin. Given all that, it's highly likely we'll see Bitcoin exchange bank accounts being frozen and/or closed again and again.  The authorities aren't going to give up easily on this one.

I'd be extremely careful doing any exchanging or trading on any Bitcoin exchanges from now on. Get your money in and out and off the exchange again and out of the way as quickly as you can.

Anyone running an exchange needs at the least a good lawyer who is well up on the financial regulations. Trouble is I don't think there are many of these around.

Please consider to kiss his ass too for this magnificent mess...

You seem to forget that:
1/he ran during 1 month a trade engine he known it was bugged
2/despite he known his bank account could be frozen since one week, he didn't inform us and some people continue to deposit fiat in these black holes
3/he unilaterally decided to cancel all trade at an arbitrary date (and we can no more get acces to trade history to verify it)
4/he distribute brainlessly BTC, exposing himself to a worse legal conundrum and exposing fiat owners to lose all

May be Simon is more stupid and irresponsible than evil, but please, don't tell us it's a hero...