Exclusive: Scintillating Scam Breaks Out In China As Coinbene Exchange Faces Allegations of Malpractice and Sexual Harassment

By Prashant Jha

The cryptocurrency market often gets a lot of flak for being unregulated and as it turns out, that is not an entirely unfounded impression. A scintillating scam involving sexual harassment, unilateral listing withdrawals and a host of other malpractices has been reported from China. A concerned investor reached out to BTCwires with information and screenshots that reveal how the Coinbene exchange has been blatantly flouting all precepts of business ethics and integrity, by treating project owners with blatant disrespect and dishonesty.

Find all the screenshots shared by the concerned person in this google drive link.

The extent of Coinbene’s insincerity has aggrieved more than just one project owner. One of them is Ducatus, that paid 1 million DUC coins to the Coinbene Exchange to be used in promotional purposes. However, a mere 26.000 (sic) was used for the same and requests from the DUCATUS CEO to return the unused coins went unheeded as Coinbene officials did not think that this was  a “specific and rational” enough reason to return the coins. Moreover, the conversation was clearly a long-drawn-out one , with Coinbene giving weak excuses such as not having the requisite contracts immediately available.

Another aggrieved party, as becomes clear from the screenshots we have received, is Ark. Ark continually requested for a listing but responses from Coinbene remained inadequate and vague. Moreover, their payment demands remained sketchy, asking for 5 BTC for consultation but failing to send the address, then going on to change it to 3 BTC upon signing the contract and the remaining 2 upon listing the first transaction pair. The Coinbene representative also continually dodged questions on what their email id was, using unsatisfactory excuses and continued to confuse Ark in their conversation over Skype.

Moreover, as the screenshots reveal, the EZ token was also abruptly delisted without any prior notice, which is anything but standard practice. While there had indeed been a “liquidity issue”, as the EZ official concedes, the lack of communication speaks of a clear lack of respect for basic business ethics.

Coinbene’s CEO Zhang Yang Bing has even been outed in a Chinese news outlet’s article that allows him of absolute “double standards” and describes him as “plain wicked”. He has also been allegedly a party to a pump and dump scheme where new investors were tricked to shell out inordinate amounts as a consortium of crypto insiders led by Bing pushed the prices. Coinbene then sold a large number of CONI coins at a very high price.

Another shocking allegation that has cast a darker pall on the credibility of the industry has been that of sexual harassment against Bing. When his attempts at unsolicited “flirting” with a woman went awry, Coinbene unfairly froze her accounts simply because they technically can, without giving a reason.

With all these allegations mounting against Coinbene and especially their CEO, it is but natural that investors are feeling uncertain and insecure. Coinbene had managed to secure a spot in CoinMarketCap’s top 20 by making unauthorized use of the names of top officials from companies such as Baidu and OKCoin, that are well-known in the market. However, now that its misdeeds are being unveiled,we can only hope better regulations usher in a stronger sense of business ethics in the crypto industry, for companies that are cheating on customers and project owners with impunity.