New Delhi (Sputnik): Coinsecure has filed a complaint with the Delhi police that bitcoins worth $3 million have been siphoned off to an unrecognized address and that it doubts its chief strategist, who was the only person in possession of the private keys to the online exchange, might be involved in the heist.
"We regret to inform you that our bitcoin funds have been exposed and seem to have been siphoned out to an address that is outside our control," Coinsecure stated in an official notification on its website on Thursday.
Coinsecure said that its system itself has never been compromised or hacked and the current issue points towards losses caused by an exercise to extract BTG to distribute to customers.
"Our chief strategist officer (CSO) Dr. Amitabh Saxena was extracting BTG and he claims that the funds have been lost in the process during the extraction of the private keys," the statement read.
"On 9th April 2018, we were informed by our CSO, Dr. Amitabh Saxena, that 438.318 (worth over $3 million) were stolen from our company's bitcoin wallet due to some attack. As the private keys are kept with Dr. Amitabh Saxena, we feel that he is making a false story to divert our attention and he might have a role to play in this entire incident," reads the first information report filed by the company with the Delhi police.
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The complainant has also made a request to the police to seize Dr. Amitabh Saxena's passport so he cannot fly out of the country.
Last week, police in the Pune city of Maharashtra had arrested Amit Bhardwaj, a bitcoin miner who fled the country a few years ago, on the charges of fraud to the tune of $307 million. Bhardwaj had introduced the first online retail marketplace accepting bitcoin in the country in 2014. According to the police, he owns a chain of bitcoin mining operations; notable among them are Gain bitcoin, which claims to have set up bitcoin mining operations in China, GB Miners, located in Hong Kong and the recently launched MCAP.