British Cryptocurrency Exchange Shut Down, $1.5m Bitcoins Missing

All the cryptocurrency held by Bitcoin exchange has gone missing, after the exchange named Moolah declared bankruptcy. The suggestions are that the cash is in the personal wallet of the company’s founder and CEO. The latter has also gone missing when Moolah went bust.

The CEO of Moolah, known as Alex Green, recently revealed that he was previously named Ryan Kennedy and changed the name by deed poll, trying to start his life over. The matter is that under his previous name, the individual had gained notoriety among such communities as fans of anime and Bitcoin investors for a number of failed business ventures. His ventures included Flirble – a web hosting service which was only functional for 2 months, as well as Lemon, a Bitcoin mining company which shut down last year.

However, this seems to be not his full biography: others also link him to the names Albright, Fletcher and Gentle before he re-emerged in 2014 to start Moolah as Green. The final saga began in the middle of 2014: in July, a rival to the Bitcoin exchange, called Mintpal, became the target of a hack and lost $2m of Bitcoins. Green acquired Mintpal a few weeks later and integrated its 70,000 accounts into Moolah.

However, a few days ago, Alex Green (already under his former name) announced that the parent company of Moolah went insolvent due to a bug in the system which allowed users to arbitrarily double their balances on a whim. At the same time, Green claimed that former users of MintPal didn’t suffer from the exploit and has not been heard from since.

However, even the users who were assured their money was safe already start worrying, because their accounts remain locked. Thanks to the open nature of the Bitcoin ecosystem, they can see exactly where the money went: almost $1.5m of it has flowed into and then out of one specific account, which is believed to belong to Green himself.

Now MintPal users cooperate, trying to figure out where the Bitcoins end up. The case in question reminds many of the digital wild goose chase which ensued after Internet black market Sheep closed down. At the time, its founder disappeared with more than 5,000 Bitcoins, and users managed to trace their money across the network, until finding out that the crook had sold the coins days before.

The questions had been raised about Greens identity before, even though Moolah was a small player in the Bitcoin market. Just a few days before Mintpal had been hacked, the local media accused Alex Green of a litany of questionable business practices. It turned out that nobody outside of Moolah had ever seen Green’s face – the company’s COO once jokingly tweeted a picture of Green: a person wearing a cardboard box on his head. Besides, Moolah’s location repeatedly changed as well. At first, the firm was registered with a Swiss address, but then it was going to move to Ireland, then to England.

Thus far, Alex Green cannot be reached for comments via his known details.