announced Accounting firm Grant Thornton, which is overseeing the liquidation of the decommissioned New Zealand platform Cryptopia, said today that it expects to open the user claims logging process by the end of the current year 2020.

As we indicated in several previous articles on the Arab Bitcoin website, Cryptopia lost NZ$30 million or about $17.85 million in cryptocurrency due to the hack and went into liquidation in May 2019.

Account holders and users of the platform recently scored a big win in court, with the court giving them priority over Cryptopia’s creditors when it comes to returning lost cryptocurrencies.

It now appears that Cryptopia users who lost their cryptocurrency are one step closer to getting their lost money back.

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Quoting from Grant Thornton:

The expectation is that the claims process will open by the end of the year with an anti-money laundering procedure to follow through on the refund process.

Once these two phases are complete, we expect a replay to follow.

To do this, the company has prepared a procedure for claiming cryptocurrencies from previous customers of the platform.

Users will need to verify their accounts and other data on a dedicated portal.

Grant Thornton’s statement read:

We cannot reopen the trading platform to return the account holders’ coins.

The Cryptopia platform has been hacked and the source of the hack remains unknown and is still being investigated by the New Zealand Police.

Due to the hacking process we have secured all the coins in a non-hacking environment before proceeding with the settlement process.

Grant Thornton added:

To recover the cryptocurrency, all Cryptopia account holders will have to take a “know your customer” action even if they already did before the hack, as it is a legal requirement in New Zealand.

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Since there is no detailed reconciliation between the customer database and cryptocurrencies held in the platform’s wallets, we cannot confirm that the account holders’ coin balances will match the actual holdings of each coin.

The liquidation company also confirmed to the account holders that the process is currently being funded from the company’s assets and that the allocation of costs for the return of digital currencies for the account holders will be subject to additional directives from the court.

As Grant Thornton points out, it is still not clear who was behind the theft or how they were able to carry it out.

But Adam Clark, the former founder of Cryptopia, had another opinion, telling him that he suspected an insider hack, and it might not have been about the money.

Clark presented his arguments in this accusation, stating:

Somehow a hacker knows where everything is.

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Someone entered with all the keys and deleted the logs on exit.

They didn’t take the untraceable coins, it wasn’t about the money, it was about hurting the company, and they were able to do that because they had direct access.

Accordingly, what was published by “Grant Thornton” is a ray of hope for those who have lost their digital currencies on the platform, and the usual advice we give in Arab Bitcoin is to use global and well-known trading platforms that have a clean record and history, in addition to the need to keep digital currencies in cold wallets when you want to store them. And keep it away from the wallets of cryptocurrency exchanges.

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