Binance Freezes Accounts Linked To Troubled Exchange Wex

By Rishma Banerjee

Wex is a Russia based cryptocurrency exchange which might have been built on the ashes of BTCe, a bitcoin exchange which was shut down by the U.S. and Greek law enforcement officials. Alexander Vinnik, a Russian national was also arrested in July 2017, for laundering billions of dollars on BTC-e. The US officials, after the 4 billion dollar fraud investigation, also charged the exchange with a $110 million fine. Wex had been launched last year, to continue on from BTCe, by taking over its ecosystem.

Wex, in July, had halted the withdrawal of funds abruptly, which led to confusion amongst its users. Speculations about the reason and cause ranged from recently-raised fiat withdrawal fees on the exchange to suspicions of insolvency. The exchange claimed that it had been done to complete scheduled maintenance issues.

Recently, the troubled exchange’s funds have been frozen by another exchange, Binance, after their users complained that the exchange was a part of money laundering deals. The prices of Bitcoin was also noticed to be significantly more abundant in its order book than global norms.

This was confirmed by a tweet on 29th October, by Binance’s CEO Chanpeng Zhao.

In response to an online trader, John James’s alert, Zhao said that Binance had quarantined funds sent from WEX associated wallets.

“[T]he identified accounts are frozen, please report to law enforcement and have a case number. We will work with LE [law enforcement].”

In a continuation, he said,

“This is part of centralization we hate too, dealing with other exchange’s mess (we don’t even know the details). But we will do what we can.”

At press time, BTC/USD on WEX.nz was quoted at $8,547 – 35 per cent higher than the CoinMarketCap average.