Crypto Exchange OKCoin Broken Into and Vandalized

On October 26, Chinese crypto exchange OKCoin was broken into and vandalized, and employees were threatened, by an unknown group. Here’s what happened at OKCoin’s Beijing office.

OKCoin Exchange Vandalized

OKCoin employees in Beijing had a rough Thursday after several people broke into the crypto exchange office. The unidentified people started breaking elevators and smashing doors.

They also threatened crypto exchange employees, pushing some of them down the stairs. However, nobody suffered any serious injuries.

They’ve alerted the police and is currently cooperating with the authorities to investigate the situation.

What Was Their Motive?

Before any official investigations have been concluded, the Internet is buzzing with different theories as to who is responsible for the vandalizing OKCoin’s Beijing offices and why.

The company itself claimed that someone paid the group to disrupt its activity.

However, others say that the incident is related to some of OKCoin’s alleged practices. Authorities have accused the platform and its founder Xu Mingxing of fraud, irregular account management and even manipulation of its trading statistics.

In August, OKCoin’s OKex platform for futures trading conducted a “clawback.” After a user accumulated a $460-million long position in Bitcoin forward contracts and refused to reduce it, OKex froze the account and had to liquidate the position.

However, it suffered huge losses that its insurance fund could not fully cover. Therefore, OKex enabled what they called “the societal loss risk management mechanism.” Essentially, the exchange took some of the profits from other users to cover part of the losses. While other exchanges are giving fees back to users, traders are accusing OKCoin of taking funds that were not theirs to take.

Exchange Founder Arrested

OKCoin was founded in 2013 in Beijing. However, after the Chinese authorities started to clamp down on cryptocurrencies and exchanges, the company’s headquarters relocated to San Francisco.

Earlier this year, Shanghai police arrested OKCoin’s founder Xu Mingxing on suspicion of fraud. Mingxing was allegedly part of a possibly fraudulent digital currency project calledWFee. However, the police later released him when they could not connect him to the fraud.

This Wasn’t the First Incident at OKCoin

Thursday’s vandalism is not the first incident that took place at OKCoin’s Beijing office.

In March, two people attempted suicide near the building. On March 24, a man named Yang Yong threatened to drink DDVP, an insecticide also known as Dichlorvos. Earlier that same day, another man, Liu Tong, reportedly almost died by jumping off the roof of the building.

Both men had suffered huge losses from their cryptocurrency futures trading.