Another day to fear centralized exchanges, not your keys not your coin

[Cookdata]

Earlier this year, around May to be precise, It was reported that one of the trading exchanges, Patricia halted withdrawals^[1] which at first they claimed(lied) that it was due to blockchain congestion but what really happened to Patricia wasn't what was disclosed to the public at first, they actually lost $2m to hack around January 2022 but they keep mum and refuse to disclose that to the public not until they seize withdrawals around April this year.

What happened like a joke turned out to be true, they have massively sacked workers and worked to get back to business again but from the look of things, they are not done with their fraud because, instead of them to resume withdrawals and allow customers to have access to their bitcoin, they decide to carry out another heist; they lunch a Patricia token(PTK)^[2] pegged to USDT with a whitepaper^[3] which is not listed on any exchange, if they have the USDTbank in the first place, they wouldn't launch another shitty stablecoin. Not only did they stop there.

They converted the user's BTC balance to the worthless stablecoin without their knowledge, no emails were sent, and no notification, who does that? Why convert BTC to PTK tokens they don't need? Looking at the status of the company, they don't have the means to pay back the customers, they don't have the liquidity to settle all the debts, the BTC on the user's wallet is only database value, no intrinsic value and this is just another FTX scam.

What have you learned? Not your keys, definitely not your coins. Never leave your BTC on another man's land, they control it while you only control the front end, you don't have the keys and you can't control what will happen in the future. Learn to keep your coins in your custody and protect your private keys and seed phrase.

[1] https://techcabal.com/2023/05/27/patricia-loses-2m-to-hack/
[2] https://techcabal.com/2023/08/19/patricia-customer-assets/
[3] https://mypatricia.co/resources/blog/patricia-token-white-paper

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[Lucius]

I've never heard of that "company", and it's no wonder considering that it's apparently a local business from Nigeria, which is apparently the product of some crypto enthusiasts with the idea of doing something, but without enough planning and professionalism to really make it work.

Whether the tokenization was part of the plan from the beginning, or whether they thought of that genius idea in the meantime, is not so important, because the end result is always the same in most cases. When I see any project that presents itself as serious and mentions its tokens as part of the business plan, I don't need anything more than to understand the direction in which the business is going.

Do not use centralized crypto exchanges, stay away from tokens and similar junk, and do not believe the fairy tales presented to you on social networks - their goal is to take your money and nothing more.

[zaim7413]

As has been the case before, you only have login access to the Exchange but do not have access to control of your coins around the clock. Not your keys not your coin has often been heard and is very often discussed in forum, after the collapse of FTX some time ago it should have been a lesson for crypto users not to trust their assets to be controlled by a centralized exchange. The freezing of assets that centralized exchanges do is unacceptable and clearly detrimental to the users of their service, users can only see the amount of assets in their account but cannot withdraw them.

Crypto asset users must be able to choose a safe place to store assets with an asset exchange. I hope that no member of this forum becomes a victim of Patricia exchange because they are too full of important information that has been shared in the forum to prevent incidents like this.

[Charles-Tim]

they lunch a Patricia token(PTK)[2] pegged to USDT with a whitepaper[3] which is not listed on any exchange, if they have the USDTbank in the first place, they wouldn't launch another shitty stablecoin. Not only did they stop there.

Patricia (scam) token was also not created on any blockchain. It is just pegged to a dollar for nothing backing it. The fear of people is also that if Patricia created a token and customers are allowed to withdraw, the token will most likely depeg because mose Patricia users will want to convert it to another coins.

https://techpoint.africa/2023/08/19/patricia-token/

[OcTradism]

Reminder: do not keep your money in online accounts. This reminder never loses its meaning so I believe it would be helpful if I share it again here.

Furthermore by looking at Exchange graveyard and see reasons of many exchange deaths, you will be more fearful with centralized exchanges.

By sharing those warning resources, I hope that less newbies will store their cryptocurrency capital on centralized exchange accounts and think it is a safe way.

[Mayor of ogba]

Earlier this year, around May to be precise, It was reported that one of the trading exchanges, Patricia halted withdrawals^[1] which at first they claimed(lied) that it was due to blockchain congestion but what happened to Patricia wasn't what was disclosed to the public at first, they lost $2m to hack around January 2022 but they keep mum and refuse to disclose that to the public not until they seize withdrawals around April this year.

What happened like a joke turned out to be true, they have massively sacked workers and worked to get back to business again but from the look of things, they are not done with their fraud because, instead of them to resume withdrawals and allow customers to have access to their bitcoin, they decide to carry out another heist; they lunch a Patricia token(PTK)^[2] pegged to USDT with a whitepaper^[3] which is not listed on any exchange, if they have the USDTbank in the first place, they wouldn't launch another shitty stablecoin. Not only did they stop there.

They converted the user's BTC balance to the worthless stablecoin without their knowledge, no emails were sent, and no notification, who does that? Why convert BTC to PTK tokens they don't need? Looking at the status of the company, they don't have the means to pay back the customers, they don't have the liquidity to settle all the debts, the BTC on the user's wallet is only database value, no intrinsic value and this is just another FTX scam.

What have you learned? Not your keys, definitely not your coins. Never leave your BTC on another man's land, they control it while you only control the front end, You don't have the keys and you can't control what will happen in the future. Learn to keep your coins in your custody and protect your private keys and seed phrases.

[1] https://techcabal.com/2023/05/27/patricia-loses-2m-to-hack/
[2] https://techcabal.com/2023/08/19/patricia-customer-assets/
[3] https://mypatricia.co/resources/blog/patricia-token-white-paper

With what has been happening around centralized exchanges such as a hack and bankruptcy, when these happened they always kept their users in the dark and cooked up a story, and they brought a plan to fix it just like what Patricia came up with. We have been told not to save our assets in a centralized exchange because we are not in control of the key anything can happen at any time and we will lose our funds.

I have heard about this Patricia exchange through a social media influencer running an advert for them. Don't allow any influencers to make you use a centralized exchange you are not sure of.

[stompix]

They converted the user's BTC balance to the worthless stablecoin without their knowledge, no emails were sent, and no notification, who does that? Why convert BTC to PTK tokens they don't need? Looking at the status of the company, they don't have the means to pay back the customers, they don't have the liquidity to settle all the debts, the BTC on the user's wallet is only database value, no intrinsic value and this is just another FTX scam.

This sounds like those scams in which you need to send an additional $500 to pay taxes so you can get your $5000 in winning!

However, there is a bit of truth in this plan, indeed you can repay debt this way if there is a firm mechanism to do so set in place, basically, the exchange would issue these tokens to cover the debt and will start a buy-back process for them with the funds for that coming from future profits dedicated exactly at this, some sort of bankruptcy model, it would also allow users to sell these debt tokens is they want to cash out easier at a cheaper price but that would not force the other debt holders to sell them at market price.

A bit of what Bitfinex did back in 2016:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitfinex-hacked-hongkong-idUSKCN10I06H

I've never heard of that "company", and it's no wonder considering that it's apparently a local business from Nigeria, which is apparently the product of some crypto enthusiasts with the idea of doing something, but without enough planning and professionalism to really make it work.

The more I read about it the murkier it gets:

Founder Hanu Agbodje bootstrapped Patricia -- meaning he hasn’t taken on institutional investors -- for the past four years after starting out with less than $2,000. The company is now planning to raise as much as $50 million to upgrade its technology, hire blockchain engineers and keep up with regulatory requirements. Agbodje expects to raise the funds in the next six months

They fled Nigeria to Estonia, they want 50 million, they have 30k claimed transactions a day while employing over 350 people, although they supposedly fired 80% of them, but..they don't have enough money to pay back 2 million.
Also no they hold a Lithuania "license" for a company with 1 employee and no title filled this year, and their so-called Canadian MSB number is a business number and the company is listed as inactive, so they don't have a Fintrac license.

[Cookdata]

With what has been happening around centralized exchanges such as a hack and bankruptcy, when these happened they always kept their users in the dark and cooked up a story, and they brought a plan to fix it just like what Patricia came up with. We have been told not to save our assets in a centralized exchange because we are not in control of the key anything can happen at any time and we will lose our funds.

I have heard about this Patricia exchange through a social media influencer running an advert for them. Don't allow any influencers to make you use a centralized exchange you are not sure of.

Centralized exchanges are organization with sole aim of making profit, if they make that public, they know for sure that it will make the news, bad news travel more than anything especially in crypto but almost the exited centralized exchanges that went through this similar situation always debunk the news to mitigate the effect on them but no matter how they hide it, the truth will prevail, you can't hide in the dark forever and those who will leave the exchange will leave without looking back which of course a good thing, let's learn to keep our coins out of centralized exchanges, we don't have to wait until disaster happen. Anyways, people that will learn from these mistakes will do and some will still turn deaf ear.

[sokani]

Patricia f**ked up big time. From the looks of things I don't think they were ever hacked, the whole thing looks sketchy. First the denied that they weren't hacked, later they suspended withdrawal and announced that they were hacked and that they perpetrators have been apprehended. They didn't disclose how the hack occured and no one was arraigned in court.  After several months, they converted all customers assets without their consent to a worthless Patricia token. Does this not look like a scam orchestrated by the team? I pity people who still entrust their assets to CEX, most of this people don't know that CEXs are bad and anything can happen to your assets. if it's not your keys then it's not your coin.

[NotATether]

Basically, if any exchange disables withdrawals of real cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin etc. and wants you to only withdraw using their own shitcoin that is recently created, then that's a sign that they have almost no liquidity of all. There are some other crypto services (not just exchanges) I know of that have done this - I tend to stay away from those services.

[HONDACD125]

What have you learned? Not your keys, definitely not your coins. Never leave your BTC on another man's land, they control it while you only control the front end, you don't have the keys and you can't control what will happen in the future. Learn to keep your coins in your custody and protect your private keys and seed phrase.

It is a fact that many people are careless in this matter. Most of the times their assets are kept in exchanges. We should never hand over our assets to someone else, even if it is a good exchange. We only have a password to access our Bitcoin. Whereas the reality is that our Bitcoin is controlled by someone else. This is also true. This is the crypto currency market and there is no telling what will happen in the future. Therefore, it is better to keep your Bitcoin in your personal wallet. Your seed phrase and your private keys should always be kept secure and not shared with anyone. Soft wallets and hard wallets are the best options for storing your Bitcoin. One should always keep one's assets in one's house instead of keeping them in someone else's house and never compromise in this regard.

[Sim_card]

Maybe or maybe not Patricia was hacked. Nobody knows if the exchange is telling the truth but the fact remains that no one should store or keep their coins in an exchange because your coins is no longer yours at the moment it is with them. It is only when you have transfer your coins out of the exchange that it becomes yours. Exchanges can come up with different stories and deny you access from your funds and they can also do whatever they like with your funds and you don't have a say. Imagine Patricia converting customers BTC to PKT without the owners concern. This sucks and shows that these exchanges are not after servicing customers properly but are out only for their personal interest. Learn how to be in full control of your bitcoin by having a noncustodial wallet.

[Hyphen(-)]

With what has been happening around centralized exchanges such as a hack and bankruptcy, when these happened they always kept their users in the dark and cooked up a story, and they brought a plan to fix it just like what Patricia came up with. We have been told not to save our assets in a centralized exchange because we are not in control of the key anything can happen at any time and we will lose our funds.

I'm not even sure if they were hacked back then, as they claimed, but they are not to be trusted because they deny their customers access to their funds, created a coin for themselves instead of settling everything and allowing their users to withdraw their funds, and then converted all users Bitcoin to their native token PKT without their consent, which is a red flag and reason not to trust them anymore.

I have heard about this Patricia exchange through a social media influencer running an advert for them. Don't allow any influencers to make you use a centralized exchange you are not sure of.

These social media influencers are promoting what they are not even using, and they probably do not do any review before starting the advertisement; they only work to be paid, which is why it is always wrong to follow social media influencers without doing further research.

Moreover, centralized exchanges are not to be trusted because of the number of them that have gone bankrupt since the start of this bear market. That is why it is always advisable to keep your Bitcoin in a wallet in which you hold the private key.

[Faisal2202]

This is some next-level scam or fraud they have committed. This must be totally unbearable for the ones who have assets in that, because FTX was not that cruel with the users funds because some gained access to them while others did not. But in this case, people are really looted by the exchange.

Thanks for such a good piece of information, and I will try to add this scam to my knowledge base whenever I have to teach someone what the actual meaning of Not Your Key, Not Your Coin means. Even though I also had some wrong ideas about it, they were corrected by many senior members, and I really appreciate that. (Obviously, I'm not going to mention where). hehe. 

[_BlackStar]

What have you learned? Not your keys, definitely not your coins. Never leave your BTC on another man's land, they control it while you only control the front end, you don't have the keys and you can't control what will happen in the future. Learn to keep your coins in your custody and protect your private keys and seed phrase.

This is another most valuable lesson about custody of investment assets - I totally agree with you. This advice must be repeated many times in order to ultimately change people's mindsets about how to store their investment assets safely. Newbie and anyone else should heed this advice - not your keys, not your bitcoin or coin.

[letteredhub]

The phrase "not your keys not your coins* , has been vindicated by this dubious act of fraud by  PTK and every crypto enthusiasts should take the caveat seriously like never before, it's no fallacy when you're told " not your keys not your coins.

Leaving your coins in a centralized exchange is like you are  a stranger in your own house with your house key in the hands of your neighbor so invariably your neighbor controls when you can or can't  have access into your house. 

If you MUST use a centralized exchange maybe for trading purpose, make it a MUST too to take it off immediately you're done with trading, send it back to your non-custodial wallet as a precaution. Don't wait to be a victim, it was Patricia exchange on April 2022,  who knows which trading Cex could be next?

[nakamura12]

That's the reason in my opinion why the advice that says "not your keys not your coins" is the number one advice in the crypto field. This id why I don't store or even use centralized exchange sites no matter what because they have the ability to take your funds in a matter of seconds compared to decentralized exchanges. As you can see, many people will always give an advice about not your keys not your coins is because of the situation that you have shared and explained. This is clear a lesson for others to be aware of and never do the same mistake.

[lionheart78]

This is the first time I heard about Patricia exchange and found out that this exchange is one of Nigeria's prominent crypto marketplaces.  It is a good thing that the Patrica exchange owner is known to the public and the affected people can file lawsuits against the people behind this exchange and PTK token.

It is clear that the launch of the PTK token and the conversion of all the balances on the exchange is a move of the exchange owner to exit the scam.  I hope the victim is able to file a complaint and make the court of Nigeria to prevent the owner of the exchange from moving out of the country.  With the current events happening, it make me think that the hack happened on the exchange is an inside job.

[SatoPrincess]

This case has been making local headlines for a while, it’s been up to a month since the exchange was supposedly hacked and yet there has been no move to reimburse customers their money. They sent an email to all their customers assuring them that the issues were being resolved and the owner also made a public apology video on Instagram and asked for more time to fix the issues the company was facing at the time. But that didn’t stop his lavish lifestyle, I can’t help but think of SBF, the similarities are too much. I just hope that Nigerians wake up to this scam and call them out on their bs.

[Sandra_hakeem]

How do people feel very comfortable HODLing Thier BTCs on centralized platforms?? I understand that it's got more features and, anyone could make direct sales when necessary, buh how about the safety??
Bruhhhh,... This happened not too long - bankman fried absconded with people's funds.... How was that a motivation to continue in centralization?? I meannnn.... Things are happening everyday and I hope people get to learn from these silly mistakes.

Sandra 🧑‍🦰