Yesterday, important news came out regarding the computer fraud that took place against the company Bitcoin ATM.
However, it should be pointed out right away that we are talking about Coin Cloud, a company that went bankrupt in February of this year.
Coin Cloud and Bitcoin ATM Scam News
Coin Cloud is a Las Vegas-based company that has begun operating more than 4,000 Bitcoin ATMs across the US, with assets between $50 million and $100 million.
However, in February filed for bankruptcy, facing liabilities of between $100 million and $500 million and approximately 10,000 creditors.
Her biggest creditor is Genesis Global Capital, which lent her a little over 100 million dollars last year. Genesis itself filed for bankruptcy in January.
Both companies are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in the US and therefore may try to restructure and possibly reopen later.
This means that even though Coin Cloud has declared bankruptcy, the company’s operations can continue, as this tweet from June shows:
Attack
The attack exposed vx-underground, which some hackers claimed compromised Coin Cloud.
The hackers were reportedly able to steal 70,000 user selfies captured by ATM cameras and 300,000 PII from Coin Cloud’s system, including social security number, date of birth, first name, last name, email address, phone number, current occupation, physical address and more.
They claim that such personal information belongs to people living in the United States and Brazil.
They also allegedly stole the source code of the company’s entire management backend.
This is therefore a very serious breach of the Coin Cloud corporate platform, even if no funds appear to have been stolen.
So far, the company has not released any statement or explanation in this regard.
Bitcoin ATMs and computer scam news
Bitcoin ATMs are automated machines that allow BTC to be traded by live individuals.
They are often set up at transit points, where it may be necessary, for example, to exchange Bitcoin for cash on the fly, and they are connected to crypto exchanges or brokers that allow fiat currency to be bought and sold.
Their main purpose is precisely to enable the exchange of Bitcoin for banknotes, and they often offer other cryptocurrencies in addition to BTC.
The problem is that the operators of these machines struggle to simultaneously satisfy customers’ demands for anonymity with the transparency demanded by authorities. Furthermore, if during bullruns they attract a lot of people who want to convert cryptocurrencies into cash, during bear markets their use drops significantly. In fact, today there are not many people who want to buy crypto by paying in wallets.
For this reason, it was not only Coin Cloud that had problems from this point of view during 2022. Indeed, even in the UK crypto ATMs are effectively banned and virtually non-existent.
Crypto ATMs in the world
On Coinatmradar.com there is a map of crypto ATMs in the world.
It is clear that while there are thousands of them in the USA, there are not many of them in Europe, for example.
Suffice it to say that after the USA, the other two countries in the world with the most crypto ATMs are Canada and Australia, while Spain and Poland stand out among the European countries.
Regulators don’t like them because they allow the exchange of banknotes whose origins are effectively unknown and untraceable for cryptocurrencies, so cryptocurrencies can be sent freely around the world.
It is no coincidence that there are almost 140 of them in little Switzerland, while there are less than 100 in Italy, less than 80 in Russia, and only 17 in France.
Despite relatively high commission costs, which in theory should allow good profits for managers, there are so many problems that it is not surprising that during the bear market many crypto ATM managers had problems with economic-financial survival.
