The cryptocurrency exchange MapleChange announced on Twitter that they have been hacked and that they are unable to give funds back to users. The exchange is not important in the market but several users have been affected by this issue. Apparently, 913 BTC have been stolen from users.

The company explained that they had a bug that allowed an attacker to withdraw all the funds held by the exchange. Something that has also affected the community, in this case, is that the exchange decided to eliminate its Twitter and other social media accounts.

One of the tweets informed that until the investigation regarding the attack is over they would not be able to refund anything to the users.

In the last years, several cryptocurrency exchanges have been hacked in many different ways. At the beginning of the year, for example, the crypto exchange Coincheck experienced an attack that resulted in the loss of most of the funds that they exchange had. At that time, the company explained that they did not hold all the funds in cold-storage wallets, that are much more secure than hot wallets.

However, there is a specific way of stealing users’ funds that is known as ‘exit scam.’ In general, any site related to virtual currencies creates a semi-functional product or service, gains the trust of the community, and when it has gathered an important amount of funds, the platform closes and takes all the money from their clients.

In general, users in the cryptocurrency space are warned that exchanges can be attacked at any moment and that online platforms that do not give the private keys to users are not safe places to store funds. And it seems that the MapleChange situation fits perfectly into the exit scam category.

In general, if a platform is hacked, they do not have to delete the social media accounts or disappear from one moment to the other. When such things happen, the owners of the exchange or platform should inform the community about the problems that it has encountered.

At the same time, there is a very short time between the first message related to the attack and the second message informing the whole situation. Twelve minutes after informing that they were investigating the issue, they wrote that the exchange was in ‘the process of a thorough investigation for this.’ Two more tweets were written, one saying that they have no more funds to pay users back and that the platform was hacked and manipulated.

Aaaaand it’s gone. If you were @MapleChangeEx trader, you just lost everything.

“some people have managed to withdraw all the funds “

This shit will continue in crypto until they bring out the handcuffs en masse.#exitscam ? pic.twitter.com/My23ws4W1h

— Dade (@dadetrading) October 28, 2018

The attack has also affected the exchange on Sunday morning, exactly at the time when users are still asleep. Additionally, MapleChange showed that they had an increased traffic during the last weeks.

At the moment there is no more information on the issue and whether the funds will be able to be recovered. However, there is a Twitter account known as @MapleChanged has been created with the intention to provide information about the exchange and those responsible for the hack and attack.

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