On the afternoon of this Tuesday, March 7, there was an error in the platform of Binance, an important cryptocurrency exchange house, which caused the altcoins of a group of users to be massively sold to later buy the Viacoin cryptocurrency without their consent.
With regard to this event, the Binance team issued an official statement according to which they claimed that this platform had not been compromised, thus clearing the rumors about a hack to this house of change. Also, the Binance team confirmed that the affected people had registered their private API keys with platforms external to Binance, for example, with trading bots. The Binance team announced the suspension of all withdrawals from its platform temporarily.
It seems, according to the discussion carried out between the community and Binance's statement in Redit, that what happened happened because of an error of a trading bot, identified as altcoinbot.io, that some users had linked with their accounts in Binance. This is what Ran Neuer, the founder of ONCHAIN capital, explains.
ºBinance Update: There was no hack! A commercial bot that some used to trade maliciously exchanged all the alts in BTC and then bought VIA. If you did not use the BOT, you are not affected
In this way, it seems that what happened was a malicious strategy of Pump and Dump that took the funds from the victims, turned them into Bitcoin, and then bought the Viacoin cryptocurrency to make it rise in price. At the time of publication, Viacoin has risen 18.67% and stands at $ 2.89, but thanks to this malicious strategy managed to reach a maximum of $ 6.55 a few hours ago.
A few hours after Binance's official statement, its CEO, Changpeng Zao, declared that all irregular transfers had been identified and would be reversed, explaining that all funds are safe.
We have localized the irregular trades, they will be reversed. All funds are safe, thanks to the fast alarm. Please learn to secure your accounts against phishing. https://t.co/o3AGfYsWtW
- CZ (not giving crypto away) (@cz_binance) March 7, 2018
We have located the irregular transfers, they will be reversed. All funds are safe, thanks to the rapid alarm. Please, learn to protect your accounts against phishing.
These events have had an impact on the market of cryptocurrencies, being part of the causes of which, at the time of writing, 98 of the 100 cryptocoins with greater market capitalization according to coinmarketcap suffer heavy losses. To the success of Binance are added recent regulatory announcements from Japan and the United States.
The pump and dump schemes, where the price of a cryptocurrency is increased in a dizzying way and then sold massively, collapsing its price, unfortunately are not new. Only a month ago, it was reported that the fraudulent scheme of the E-Coin crypto currency inflated its price by 4,000% in a single day only to collapse in a matter of hours.
james L - Economista. Libertario. Entusiasta de las criptomonedas.