You can pretty much trace all the info in the blog archive. That's as much as I got as well, and I lost 9 fucking BTC because of those incompetent fucks.
That is a story you would need to tell us with more details, and I guess 9 BTC was a much less few years ago but it hurts you more and more as Bitcoin value goes up :/
Well, OK. Here's a short version:
Me and some friends were running a small neighborhood cafe. It was a side gig for me (I'm primarily a c++ dev, working remote). The cafe was right across the street from my home and I used to spend a lot of time there. Then I got the idea to install a BTM in the cafe. Did some research about various manufacturers, etc... BitX was the cheapest, but I had some red flags w.r.t. the custodial wallet, etc... But, through some contacts, I got in touch with Bitlendingclub, who had a BitX machine in their office just gathering dust, because they had bought it, but none of them had the time to put into operating it, and they were more than happy to get rid of it. So I just drove a few km to their office, loaded it in a van and the next day it was operating in the cafe. So this was the first two-way BTM in Bulgaria. We also started accepting bitcoin payments and we gave 10% discount if you paid in bitcoin (the BitX machine could function as a POS terminal as well). At some point lots of people started coming in just to look at the machine, or just to pay their bill in btc. We started hosting bitcoin meetups every month. It was pretty fun. When someone came around and needed help, they'd just call me (if I wasn't already there) and I'd just come down and help the person to create a wallet, answer questions, etc... Met with a lot of interesting folks that way, and the place kind of became the bitcoin go-to in Bulgaria. I even met with the Lamassu founders, Josh and Harvey. They came to some of the meetups.
Regarding the machine itself, I was pretty disappointed. The customer support was atrocious, at one point even threatening to stop answering my tickets. No double spend protection when selling bitcoin. It would just spew out the cash before even 1 confirmation has passed. The POS terminal was a joke. It printed out a piece of paper with two QR codes, one labeled bill and one tip. So if you wanted to pay and give a tip you would need to make TWO on-chain transactions. Anyway, it kinda did the job, and I was constantly monitoring whats was going on.
Now comes the sad part.
I was always cautious not to hold too much BTC in the wallet. Always around 1-2 btc and just refill when empty. I had a guy call me up that said he wants to buy 5-6 btc in the next few days, and I was going on vacation, so I just topped up the account with another 6-7 btc, just this once(tm). Talk about bad timing. When I came back from vacation the machine was showing a system message that said that the network was under a heavy DDoS attack and that they were working to fix it ASAP. A couple of days passed without the situation improving. Then I came across an article about a theft at BitXatm. So I learned about the theft from a news site, not from BitX! Lots of angry email later they started a "compensation process". I filled out claims forms, sent them notarized documents of my claims, yada, yada. At one point they just stopped responding to emails.
I did some research and figured out that some of the other BTMs that were robbed belonged to Bitcoin Suisse, so I got in touch with them in order to try to organize a common lawsuit. There was also a Korean operator who was also a victim of the theft. Long story short, we decided not to engage in lawsuits, because it would probably cost more money then we'd lost, and even if we win, they'd just go bankrupt and we'd still get nothing. At the time, I think, my 9 btc lost were worth around $10K.
As there were a lot of people still coming in to trade btc I started doing p2p trades, which turned out to be a lot easier and fun. That's why I never bought another BTM.
As to the guy that died in prison: I occasionally email the CEO (Gabriel Prodanescu), who now claims that he doesn't work for BitX anymore, but still answers to his @bitxatm email.
Last time he wrote me this:
Did you follow the case from the Criminal Court ?
The employee is DEAD, the Criminal Court closes the case.
Bitx has the factory closed from 2018 with no more production for sale, is over.
Open source project is available to existing customer
We lost it all!
I pushed some more and he sent me scans of death certificate and other documents(in Romanian). I'd love if someone that speaks Romanian could translate them and even verify if that's true or not.
As to the "open source project", I sent multiple emails to get access, and only silence from the other end.
Anyway, here's a fun video from the joint
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1dZDFrHLro
