New Zealand-based cryptocurrency exchange Cryptopia suspended trading and went offline on Tuesday after revealing that it had suffered a security breach, resulting in “significant losses.”
The company said in a tweet that the hacking happened on Monday, January 14 and that after it had been “identified by staff, the exchange was put into maintenance while we assessed the damages.”
— Cryptopia Exchange (@Cryptopia_NZ) January 15, 2019
CoinDesk points to tweets from Whale Alert – which tracks transactions made by big-money “Bitcoin whales” – indicating large sums of coins that had been transferred from the Cryptopia Exchange over the weekend.
Meanwhile, tweets from Whale Alert on Saturday indicated that 19,391 ether (ETH) tokens worth nearly $2.44 million and around 48 million centrality (CENNZ) tokens worth about $1.18 million were transferred from Cryptopia to unknown wallets on Jan. 13. It is not currently clear if those funds were moved by the hacker or by the exchange.
The Cryptopia Exchange’s website remained offline as of Tuesday afternoon in New York, with a message saying that it “is currently in unscheduled maintenance mode. We will be back soon.”
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