Bitmarket.pl — Poland’s Second-Largest Exchange Collapsed, Taking 2,300 Bitcoin With It

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.