The Livecoin exchange suspended operations after the BTC price there reached $ 222,000.

Livecoin claims to have been hacked by a known hacker.

Some in the community suspect a complex exit scam

On December 24, 2020, Livecoin halted trading after Bitcoin reached $ 220,000. The exchange claims to have been hacked, but some in the community believe it to be a coordinated exit scam. Some say this is not the first time Livecoin has been hacked.

Over the past two days, Bitcoin’s price has climbed to $ 220,000 on the Livecoin exchange. Along with this exaggerated rise in BTC, Ethereum ’s price rose 960% to $ 6,500.

While Bitcoin’s Christmas price of $ 25,000 might have sounded incredible, Livecoin’s seemed too good to be true. And it was the case. After this mega-rise in price, the platform stopped withdrawals.

However, users suspect that the platform suffers from an exit scam , or even that it is the instigator.

LIvecoin’s BTC page, price hovering around $ 200,000: Forklog

According to Forklog , this price increase was initially blamed on a technical difficulty. In an announcement on the homepage, the team promised that the site would return to normal operation soon.

Frustrated users, however, conducted their own survey. Twitter user @yukio_staker noticed that funds, including 285 ETH, had been withdrawn from Livecoin wallets . One of them, @yukio_staker, claims that it is a wallet used by hackers during the EXMO hack on Monday, December 21 for around $ 16 million.

Later, the AMLBot, which tracks the addresses of malicious individuals, discovered that Livecoin’s BTCs were in the same wallet as those stolen during the EXMO exchange hack:

Today, the #Livecoin exchange has been hacked. 3 days ago, the #EXMO exchange was hacked. Interestingly, the BTCs from both hacks arrived at the same address 1A4PXZE5j8v7UuapYckq6fSegmY5i8uUyq.

Livecoin changed its warning message to say that their exchange had been the victim of a “carefully planned” attack for months. The company said their back-end, servers, and nodes had all been compromised.

They only regained control of part of the front-end functionality, which allowed them to issue the warning message. This message asks users not to make transactions, not to deposit money, and not to make deposits.

According to Forklog, 106 BTC , 361 ETH and 236 BCH had been stolen via the linked addresses.

That said, users felt something fishy.