QuadrigaCX, Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange at its peak, collapsed in early 2019 after co-founder and CEO Gerald Cotten died in Jaipur, India on December 9, 2018, leaving 115,000 users locked out of wallets holding approximately C$215 million in cryptocurrency and cash. The platform had operated since December 2013, growing to serve hundreds of thousands of registered users across Canada and internationally. The exchange announced Cotten’s death publicly on January 14, 2019, claiming no other employee possessed the encryption passwords to the cold wallets. The exchange filed for creditor protection under Canada’s Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act on January 31, 2019.
Subsequent investigation by the Ontario Securities Commission, completed in April 2020 and published June 11, 2020, determined that what appeared to be a tragic accident was in fact a long-running fraud. Cotten had been operating a Ponzi scheme for years: he created accounts under aliases, credited himself with fictitious cryptocurrency balances, traded against his own customers, and covered accumulating losses with incoming client deposits. The OSC calculated that C$169 million of the asset shortfall was attributable to Cotten’s fraudulent conduct, with approximately C$115 million arising directly from his fake-balance trading. No criminal conviction has ever been recorded — Cotten is officially deceased — and no assets approaching the scale of the losses have been recovered.
The 115,000 users who held active balances at collapse were predominantly ordinary Canadian retail investors, many of whom had deposited savings, retirement funds, and money exchanged from national currency into Bitcoin and Ethereum on a platform that projected institutional legitimacy. As of May 2023, creditors received an interim distribution of 13 cents on the dollar, calculated on claims worth C$303.1 million — a figure that reflects continuing losses in real terms as cryptocurrency prices moved over the intervening years.
WEX.nz, a Russian-operated cryptocurrency exchange registered in New Zealand, collapsed in mid-2018 with somewhere between $400 million and $500 million in user deposits missing. The platform had launched in September 2017 as a near-identical copy of BTC-e — a notoriously shadowy exchange seized by US and European authorities in July 2017 for facilitating billions of dollars in money laundering — and was operated by Russian national Dmitry Vasiliev. Within eleven months of launch, WEX froze withdrawals, shed its domain names, and went dark. Vasiliev was later arrested in Warsaw and extradited to the United States in mid-2025 to face charges of fraud and money laundering.
The WEX story is inseparable from BTC-e, but they are distinct events. BTC-e was founded around 2011 and operated for six years as one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, processing more than $9 billion in transactions while deliberately serving criminal clients including ransomware operators and darknet marketplaces. Its operator, Alexander Vinnik, was arrested in Greece in July 2017. WEX.nz then appeared as an ostensible continuation of BTC-e — inheriting user balances, the trading interface, and much of the user base — but it operated only under Vasiliev’s direction and lasted less than a year before its own exit. The two cases involve separate operators, separate legal proceedings, and separate thefts; understanding that distinction is essential to understanding either.
The roughly 100,000 users who trusted WEX with their deposits had already survived the BTC-e shutdown and accepted Vasiliev’s reassurances that their balances were intact and the new exchange was legitimate. Most recovered nothing. As of mid-2026, Vasiliev is in US custody awaiting trial; no meaningful restitution has reached victims.
Bitgrail, a small Italian cryptocurrency exchange operated by Francesco Firano, collapsed in February 2018 after Firano announced that approximately 17 million Nano tokens — worth roughly $170 million at the time of the announcement — had been stolen from the platform. Firano initially framed the loss as an external hack and demanded that the Nano development team alter the blockchain to reverse the transactions, a demand the team publicly refused. Italian courts subsequently determined that the losses resulted from Firano’s own gross mismanagement, that he had known about early-stage thefts for months before disclosing them, and that he had personally extracted Bitcoin from the exchange in the days immediately before making the loss public. The Florence Bankruptcy Court declared both Bitgrail and Firano personally bankrupt in January 2019, ordered him to repay users to the maximum extent possible from seized personal assets, and authorized the seizure of his property.
The platform had operated since approximately 2016 and became one of the world’s primary venues for trading Nano — then known as RaiBlocks — during the cryptocurrency bull market of late 2017 and early 2018. At the peak of the bull market, Nano was among the most actively discussed alternative cryptocurrencies, and Bitgrail’s position as an early listing venue gave it disproportionate control over the market for a token with a large and passionate community. When the collapse came, approximately 230,000 registered users were affected, though the number with active balances at risk was a subset of that total.
Italian criminal authorities separately investigated Firano’s conduct and alleged he was directly responsible for the hacks, not merely negligent in preventing them. The distinction between criminal fraud and civil mismanagement — one carrying a criminal conviction and the other an obligation to repay — defined the legal proceedings for years. As of mid-2026, Firano had been declared civilly bankrupt and ordered to repay victims; criminal proceedings were initiated but a final criminal conviction and sentence remained to be confirmed through Italian court records for this reporting period.
Bitsane, a Dublin-registered cryptocurrency exchange that had been operating since 2016, vanished on June 17, 2019. Its website went offline, its Twitter and Facebook accounts were deleted, and emails to support addresses began bouncing as undeliverable. The platform had counted 246,000 registered users and a daily trading volume of approximately $7 million as recently as March 31, 2019. Neither the named CEO, Aidas Rupsys, nor the named CTO, Dmitry Prudnikov, responded to press inquiries, appeared before any regulatory authority, or made any public statement explaining the closure. The operators have not been publicly located, charged, or identified through any confirmed legal proceeding as of the date of this report.
The disappearance followed a pattern that had become familiar in the 2019 period of exchange failures: withdrawal failures that began weeks before the final closure, support communications that cited unspecified technical reasons, and a terminal event in which all public-facing infrastructure was simultaneously deleted. Users who had held cryptocurrency on the platform — primarily XRP, Bitcoin, and other digital assets — found their balances inaccessible with no recourse pathway. The exchange had gained particular prominence as an early trading venue for XRP (Ripple), having at one point been listed as one of Ripple’s approved exchanges, and a significant portion of the affected user base held XRP positions.
Individual losses documented in reporting ranged from several thousand dollars to a single documented case of $150,000 in XRP and Bitcoin held by one US-resident user. The aggregate dollar loss is not established in any public regulatory or court filing; estimates reported at the time ranged widely. The case remains unresolved: no criminal charges have been filed, no assets have been frozen by Irish or European regulators, and no recovery mechanism has been established for affected users.
MapleChange, a small Canadian cryptocurrency exchange that had launched in May 2018, announced on October 28, 2018 that it had suffered a hack in which all funds were drained from its hot wallets. The same day, the exchange deleted its Twitter account, its Discord server, its Telegram channel, and its website. The reported loss was 913 Bitcoin — approximately $5.9 million at the time — which the exchange attributed to a bug that allowed users to exploit the withdrawal system. No verifiable evidence of an external hack was ever produced. The exchange’s operators were never publicly identified through any confirmed name or legal proceeding, and no charges have been filed in connection with the incident.
The sequence of events on October 28 — hack announcement followed within hours by simultaneous deletion of every public-facing channel — was widely characterised by security researchers and the crypto press as an exit scam executed under the cover of a fabricated security incident. The anonymous internet investigation that followed the deletion identified an individual suspected to be behind the exchange, but no law enforcement body has publicly confirmed or acted on that identification. Approximately five months of operations and 913 Bitcoin in customer deposits were the total scope of the exchange’s existence.
The users who lost funds at MapleChange were cryptocurrency traders who had deposited Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other altcoins into a platform that had listed 62 trading pairs and was in the process of building a user base. Many had modest balances; some had more significant positions. The exchange had been in operation for only five months, had no known regulatory registration, no published team information, and no audited financial records.
Bitmarket.pl, Poland’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, ceased all operations on July 8, 2019, posting a brief notice on its website attributing the closure to a sudden loss of liquidity. The platform had operated since approximately 2015 under the control of co-owners Tobiasz Niemiro and Marcin Aszkiełowicz, who had taken over an exchange that already carried an outstanding deficit of more than 600 BTC at the time of their acquisition. When the platform went offline, users found they could not access or withdraw an estimated 2,300 bitcoin — then worth approximately PLN 100 million ($25 million USD) — held in their accounts.
The District Prosecutor’s Office in Suwałki opened a criminal investigation, overseen by the Department of Combating Cybercrime of the Provincial Police Headquarters in Olsztyn. More than 400 users filed formal complaints, and prosecutors later concluded that from mid-2015 through July 7, 2019, the exchange’s operators had systematically misled customers about the financial condition of the platform. On September 12, 2019, Marcin Aszkiełowicz was formally charged with defrauding 525 users of assets totalling PLN 22.66 million ($5.8M), a charge carrying a maximum sentence of ten years’ imprisonment. He was additionally accused of defrauding a share buyer the same year by misrepresenting the company’s financial position. Polish prosecutors indicated the full scope of losses attributable to the period of operation was substantially larger.
Tobiasz Niemiro, the exchange’s other co-owner, was found dead on July 25, 2019, in a forest near Olsztyn, approximately three weeks after the exchange closed. Polish authorities and Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s leading national newspaper, reported the death as an apparent suicide by gunshot. Acquaintances publicly disputed that characterisation. No criminal conclusion regarding the circumstances of Niemiro’s death has been reported. He was 44 years old. The legal proceedings against Aszkiełowicz continued. No trial verdict has been publicly confirmed in available sources as of the time of this writing.
YouBit, a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange formerly operating under the name Yapizon, collapsed into bankruptcy on December 19, 2017, after sustaining two separate intrusions in the same calendar year that together stripped approximately 21 percent of its total assets. The April 2017 hack cost the exchange 3,816 bitcoin, valued at approximately $5 million at the time. The December 2017 hack — attributed by South Korean intelligence and independent security researchers to the North Korean state-linked Lazarus Group — removed a further 17 percent of remaining assets, estimated at between $7 million and $16 million in contemporary reporting. Upon filing for bankruptcy, the exchange’s parent company, Yapian, announced that users would receive an immediate payment equivalent to 75 percent of their holdings, with the balance subject to the bankruptcy process.
That 25 percent haircut, imposed unilaterally at the moment of failure, was not the end of the controversy. Yapian had obtained a cyber insurance policy from DB Insurance just 20 days before declaring bankruptcy. DB Insurance denied the claim, asserting that Yapian had violated its advance notice obligation — the standard requirement for policyholders to disclose material information that would affect the policy before purchasing it. The insurer’s denial was based on the inference that Yapian had known of existing vulnerabilities or risks at the time it took out coverage. Critics argued the insurance was obtained specifically to limit the operator’s financial exposure at bankruptcy, a charge Yapian denied.
The exchange briefly re-emerged in 2018 under the Coinbin brand following an acquisition, but that entity also collapsed in February 2019 after its CEO disclosed that a former Youbit executive — identified as a general manager named Lee — had embezzled company funds and deleted private keys controlling wallets holding approximately 100 ETH. Total losses at CoinBin’s bankruptcy were placed at $26 million. No criminal conviction of exchange operators in connection with the YouBit bankruptcy proceedings specifically has been confirmed in publicly available reporting; the CoinBin case generated separate embezzlement allegations against the named employee.
Coinroom, one of Poland’s most active retail cryptocurrency exchanges, executed an exit scam on April 2, 2019, notifying users via a brief email that the platform was terminating all contracts and that customers had approximately 24 hours to withdraw their holdings. Customers who did not act — or who tried and found their withdrawals blocked — lost deposits ranging from PLN 300 ($79) to PLN 60,000 ($15,660). Seconds after the deadline passed, the exchange’s website went dark, its phone lines went silent, and all social media accounts were deleted. The company’s director, Tomasz Zbigniew Wiewior, disappeared. Polish prosecutors opened a criminal investigation, but as of available reporting, no arrest or conviction of Wiewior has been publicly confirmed.
The exchange had been registered in 2016 and began operating its trading platform in 2017, offering Polish retail users a straightforward fiat-to-crypto on-ramp with PLN pairs for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other major cryptocurrencies. It carried no regulatory oversight, operated without any mandatory capital reserve requirement, and maintained no deposit protection mechanism. Its user base was predominantly Polish, composed largely of retail investors making first or second cryptocurrency purchases, many of whom held balances equivalent to weeks or months of savings.
The April 2019 exit was not spontaneous. The sequence of preparation required — deleting social media profiles, disabling the website, shutting down telephone lines, and creating the infrastructure for Wiewior to leave the jurisdiction — constitutes coordinated pre-planning. Reporting from Polish financial publication Money.pl and others indicated that Wiewior was alleged to have established a company in Estonia prior to the closure, suggesting advance preparation for departure. No public charges have been filed against Wiewior in available reporting as of the time of this dossier, and no assets have been returned to depositors.