Another day, another exit scam. This time it comes to us from South Korea where an exchange, Pure Bit, has completely shut down after raising $2.8 million in Ethereum from investors.
The exchange, which promised to deliver something call Pure Coin, was live yesterday and today is completely shut down after posting “Sorry” and “Thanks” to their communications channels.
According to a Reddit thread, the team was anonymous and that the process of building and pumping exchange tokens is a “popular trend in Korea.”
“They have gotten rid of every evidence,” wrote one reader. “Website hosted by fake name / out of Korea host / messenger / contacts were all fake too. Now their only hope is to keep on track with that ether and hope for the best.”
There is no proof yet that the team has pulled a full exit scam – there are examples of founders pretending to scam their investors to “teach them a lesson” – but given the abrupt movement of 13,000 ETH out of the collection wallet we can assume that the story ends here.
Even their chat room, hosted on their own site, is shut down.
It should be noted that South Korea has banned ICOs, giving scammers the perfect cover for absolute anonymity.
– New Korean exchange Pure Bit just pulled an exit scam claiming 13,000ETH from its investors as we speak. Kakao channels are emptying and the site has been pulled.
This is why we can’t have nice things. Karma comes back hard when you screw this many people over. pic.twitter.com/GDkjiz1gAq
— Korean Cryptocurrency & Blockchain News (@BlockchainROK) November 9, 2018
