https://imgur.com/a/z7nl3
Chat with owner of BitGrail exchange Francesco "Bomber" Firano.
I find this loss of funds to be quite disturbing in the sense that Nano has been practically endorsing this exchange from the beginning.
I personally have lost a rather sizeable amount of my portfolio from this fiasco,
yet another reminder to never store your coins on an exchange. An exchange is defined as a marketplace in which cryptocurrencies are traded. The core function of an exchange is to ensure fair and orderly trading, as well as efficient dissemination of price information. If you are not trading, you have no business leaving anything on there.
I feel this will only fuel the push for decentralized exchanges such as WAVES & OpenLedger.
Nano has issued a statement regarding the issue
https://medium.com/@nanocurrency/official-statement-regrading-bitgrail-insolvency-ed4422bf274b
Stating that the authorities have been contacted and they now have sufficient reason to believe that Firano has been misleading the Nano Core Team and the community regarding the solvency of the BitGrail exchange for a significant period of time.
I would like to note this post from reddit user naelsondouglas:
"As stated, the Nanos were stolen from the https://raiblocks.net/account/index.php?acc=xrb_39ymww61tksoddjh1e43mprw5r8uu1318it9z3agm7e6f96kg4ndqg9tuds4
So I listed the last visible withdraw transactions for this account ~~~ embed:96decd56af52ec94ddbbe9bbc6ab3dbb and that's what I found. gist metadata:TmFlbHNvbkRvdWdsYXMvOTZkZWNkNTZhZjUyZWM5NGRkYmJlOWJiYzZhYjNkYmIgYW5kIHRoYXQncyB3aGF0IEkgZm91bmQu ~~~
It is the list of the addresses Bitgrail representative 1 sent nanos.
Then I sorted this table to show what addresses got more withdraws from BG representative 1.
And that's what I found, a list organized by accounts and times it BG representative 1 sent money to it.
The accounts with more WD's are the more suspect, like this one with 11 transactions
https://raiblocks.net/account/index.php?acc=xrb_3oa4bdankfwnaohi7z3yqot4cewtp1u5gotaci69joidfqzgwtj35rm6apn1
And as we can see, someone was sending money directly from Bitgrail to Mercatox.
Maybe Mercatox has the sender e-mail and IP registered and they can identify who's been doing that. With luck they can identify the scammer."
Ironically if there is some scammer out there, the notable delay times in Mercatox withdrawls could keep them there long enough to be isolated on the exchange.
There are also rumors going around that they are being sold off on Binance, and the team are working to isolate the accounts possibly connected. What good that will do I'm not too sure,
but I highly doubt much will come of any of the losses from Bitgrail.
I truly believe the devs knew about this whole scenario, what truly bankrupted BitGrail was a bug causing people with $5 to receive $20 and they were able to withdraw that $20 later, so as a result there is 17 million Nano missing right now.
Many are taking legal action, some are just accepting the loss. As for me, I think I'll be going for a long walk with my Dog until I can figure out how to break it to the family. All I can say is, expect the worst and for your money to be gone. This will save you from a lot of heartbreak if this indeed proves to be the case. Take it as a hard lesson in the world of crypto, never go all in and never trust anyone.
This massive oversight in missing funds is gross negligence at its finest on BitGrails part, and I truly hope all those affected get answers as soon as possible.