- Suspicious activity at CoinBene
- Exchange users wary of the possibility of an exit scam
- Trading volumes manipulation in cryptocurrency exchanges is alarming
Operations at CoinBene were affected for about an hour; this led to its users having worries that the exchange might be hacked. In response to their users’ worries, the exchange announced in a tweet that they were upgrading their platform on Tuesday, which affected deposits and withdrawals but not trading.
Suspicious activities at CoinBene
According to the Bitwise Asset Management report presented to the SEC, CoinBene presents characteristics typicalof suspicious exchanges. These characteristics include perfect or even distribution of buy and sell orders. Buying and selling is a random activity, and thus distribution should also be random. Where the buying and the selling distribution appear perfect, it could be as a result of manipulation of the numbers.
Data collected from CoinBene shows that the best offer to buy a bitcoin was $3239.59 and the best offer to sell the same bitcoin was $3274.33. The difference in the two figures is $34.74; this is huge compared to that at Coinbase Pro which rests at $0.01. This is suspicious especially when CoinBene claims to have 18 times more transaction volumes than Coinbase Pro.
Trade volumes vary from time to time; thus, there is no such thing as a minimal trade. This means that trade volumes should range from small to large for undistorted numbers. At CoinBene, the smallest trade shown from their data is $1400 whereas Coinbase had trades going as low as $5. Moreover, looking at CoinBene numbers, you will find that each buy comes with a sell meaning for each buy there is an offsetting sell which affirms the suspicions.
CoinBene users wary of potential exit scam
Several users have reported seing suspicious activities on CoinBene when deposits and withdrawals were abruptly suspended. The users were not convinced by the administrations claim that they were having upgrades on the platform but instead thought that it might be yet another scam in the platform or merely a mitigation measure of evading a hacking attempt, but the weighing balance seems to be leaning towards an exit-scam end according to the community. There are speculations among CoinBene users that Maximine coin (MXM) is somehow involved in whatever is going on at CoinBene, seeing as the not so popular coin has had a 700% rise this month alone.
Trading volume manipulation on cryptocurrency exchanges
Towards the end of last year, Blockchainreporter reported about Bithumb being accused of faking over 70% of its trading volume. Well, that did not end there, a new study reveals that trading volumes in most of the cryptocurrency exchanges are suspicious with 75% of exchanges reporting trading volumes that were double the expected volumes.
Exchanges such as BitMax and Lbank were found to have reported trading volumes that were ten times the expected. Okex is another crypto exchange with completely fabricated trade volumes. The manipulated trade volumes are mainly to create an impression that there is a good level of trading going on to attract users to the said exchange, and that never turns out so well for the crypto community. It is no surprise that most investors could only acquire the Apollo token (APL) on CoinBene.
