Satowallet, a Nigerian cryptocurrency wallet provider, has allegedly pulled a $1 million exit scam after going offline. The firm is blaming its data center providers for the issue.
According to a report by the International Business Times, Satowallet was founded back in 2017 and complaints against it started piling in April of this year when users topped being able to withdraw funds from its platform. Presumably, the wallets provided didn’t give users access to their private keys.
At the time, Satowallet claimed it was facing temporary technical problems and started blaming Telegram scammers for stealing users’ funds during the maintenance period. Later on, in June, it claimed to have fixed the issue and implement know-your-customer (KYC0) checks users would have to go through before accessing funds.
In August, the platform went offline. Its CEO, Samuel Benedict, pointed the blame to its data center providers OVH, as it claims that once the website came back up all of the funds had vanished.
This past few weeks we have had series of issues beyond our immediate control , with regards to our data centre providers ( OVH) @OVH . Resulting into delayed and loss of transactions, we hope to get a possible response to resolve this ASAP.
— CEO Satowallet Exchange (@thesamuelben) August 10, 2019
At the time he also claimed the company’s Twitter account was suspended for no real reason. This month, Benedict added that OVH “used its powers” to contact Medium and get Satowallet’s account there suspended as well.
Dear users, OVH could not respond to claims , but used their powers to contacted medium to suspend our account and insist that we remove every mention of their name and chats. This is more grounds for us to further our suits . #Satowallet pic.twitter.com/qm82UDKB4F
— CEO Satowallet Exchange (@thesamuelben) September 26, 2019
IF this is indeed an exit scam it isn’t the first one to occur in the cryptocurrency space. Various initial coin offerings ended up turning into exit scams, as their founders simply deleted their online presence after receiving thousands or even millions in funding.
Featured image by Andrea Natali on Unsplash.
