Canadian cryptocurrency payment solutions provider CoinPayments Inc., has reportedly begun informing some clients of a bug that made it possible for some users of the service to withdraw excessive amounts of Ripple (XRP) tokens from other users’ wallets.
In an email to affected clients, CoinPayments CEO Alex Alexandrov said the bug had been fixed:
“We have done a full review of our systems and added additional checks and protections to make sure similar issues don't occur in the future.”
According to Alexandrov's
email, on June 5, 2017, some opportunistic CoinPayments users took advantage of an undiscovered bug to unjustly enrich themselves with XRP on deposit at other clients’ online wallets,
“Their detailed personal information has been collected and they all have been contacted to return the funds immediately. We are in communication with some already and reclamation process has begun with the help of our lawyers.,” says the
email communique sent to affected clients.
While CoinPayments claims some of the funds have been recovered, no official statement has been released by the company on the theft, or the exact number of users involved in the incident.
Many affected clients took to social media and popular forums to express their frustration and skepticism with CoinPayments’ statements:
A special Facebook
group has been launched by victims considering a class action lawsuit against CoinPayments. Rukawa Kaede, a Ripple investor from Taiwan, said in a Facebook post that he had 2.45 million XRP tokens - approximately $685,989 at current exchange rates - removed from his CoinPayments account.
If legal maneuvers by CoinPayments’ legal team fail to recover the stolen XRP, CoinPayments said in their email that ¼ of the company’s revenue will go towards making victims whole:
“Additionally, we will dedicate 1/4 of our revenue flowing directly to effected users until we restore all of the missing value in their accounts. All coins recovered will be evenly distributed among all accounts effected as those come in.”
Code bug photo by
Guilherme Tavares
