Francesco Firano (aka The Bomber), the founder of shady cryptocurrency exchange BitGrail has been reportedly ordered to repay the $170 million worth of cryptocurrency that went “missing” last year by an Italian judge.
As per the reports, the Italian court has seized all the remaining assets of the controversial company, which is reported to be managed by a special administrator. The court has also ordered the cryptocurrency exchange to remain closed until its bankruptcy proceedings progress.
The document shared by the BitGrail victim online suggests that Firano has regularly mishandled the security matters related to the private keys (cryptocurrency) of BitGrail users. It was also found that at one point, Firano had transferred customer funds into wallets under direct BitGrail control but in the long run, he was unable to secure the currency.
In short, Firano failed to secure the NANO cryptocurrency by installing any suitable safeguards that could have stopped the intruder from repeatedly making transactions without asking for the authorization.
As a result of repetitive withdrawals, millions of dollars worth of NANO was being lost on multiple occasions about which Firano didn’t appropriately disclose anything to its users.
Now, the doc shared by the court states that more than $1 million in personal assets along with millions of dollars that were being managed by BitGrail has already been seized.
What surprised the most is the Firano activity after getting familiar with the hack. Days before revealing that $170 million worth of user’s cryptocurrency had been “lost,” Firano deposited 230 Bitcoins ($1.8M) onto another cryptocurrency exchange in a bid to exchange it for Euros.
The investigating officer who is looking after the issue found that Firano had also attempted to withdraw money through a Bitcoin ATM linked to that exchange.
Last year, after getting familiar with the loss of NANO cryptocurrency, Firano agreed to return 20 percent of the lost funds immediately with a pledge to eventually give back the rest. However, later he made an announcement regarding the payments and mentioned that the missing funds instead of getting returned in NANO will be given in the form of newly created “BitGrail Shares” token.
Now, an unfortunate question still remains active as it is still unclear about how much cryptocurrencies Firano will be able to pay back and in how much time.
