My experience with the Bitconnect hack

This is only my second submission on Steem outside of random comments on stories I find interesting or entertaining. Unfortunately it is on a subject I now feel I have to comment on even though I'd prefer not to, and it will be my last submission on anything bitconnect related. Regardless of where you stand on the legitimacy argument surrounding bitconnect, what I've experienced after the hacking that occurred this week, I've discovered something concerning about this company.

As a brief overview, earlier this week the bitconnect site experienced severe slowdown for anyone trying to access their accounts. It turns out hackers had found an exploit in their system that when pressed, allowed them to make multiple withdrawals from the same balance. As I later read from a user on their site posting section, this issue had been known by multiple users and brought to their attention but was rebuffed as simply an anomaly.

I went to log in Wednesday afternoon to withdraw what paltry payouts I had been saving in the BCC wallet for a couple weeks (about $50)to xfer over to another exchange. The BCC sale went through just fine, but when I tried to transfer the BTC off of their platform, I received an error. I figured it must be my error so I tried again. Same problem. I tried a few different things, checking passwords, deposit address, 2FA, etc. I even finally resorted to restarting my computer (hey stranger things have caused these types of issues before!) and even disabled 2FA in case there was a sync'ing issue. All to no avail. One thing I eventually noticed when trying to make this withdrawal was that there were miner fees being deducted from the balance (four times @ 0.0007 BTC) even tho the transfer was not going through. After realizing this, I finally gave up in frustration and decided to wait a while and see if any news surfaced on what might be causing the problem.

News did break a couple hours later about the hack and so I logged back into my account to see if anything weird had happened. It did. My balance was now showing higher than the original amount. I checked the transaction history on the site and saw two txIDs showing different, but very similar amounts close to my original withdrawal attempt. I hadn't tried making a withdrawal at this point, or any point after the initial attempts from earlier. When I tried to search blockchain.info for the txIDS, they came up not found. I honestly didn't think it was possible for this type of thing to happen on the blockchain but I only have limited understanding of how the blockchain functions and figured I was simply not understanding something, so I logged out and left it alone until the next day to see if anything new would be announced.

The next day I wake up to see this:

That money is still sitting there, waiting for information on what needs to be done with it. My original balance was somewhere around 0.0120 BTC, but multiple withdrawal fees were deducted and recorded. Today we see an information release that people who benefited intentionally or unintentionally will be given five days starting Aug 30, to make their account square (which shows a negative balance apparently, though at the moment if this affects you, you're unable to log into your account to see what your balance shows). I have not received any communication in any form about the state of my account, it's balance, or what to do to fix it. What I HAVE seen is that if I do not return this money within their allotted time period, my personal information will be published to the platform.

NB: Account holders that do not clear the negative balances within the 5 days stipulated will have their data published on the >platform.

In the meantime, the negative account holder's details will be sent to the respective one structure promoters to recover the >funds.

Now I want to reiterate here, I have had, and still have every intention of giving back the money that was incorrectly sent to me due to the failure in their system when I was attempting to do business in the way it's agreed to be done on their site. I'm not a thief, and the money is not mine. The issue I have is that they have said nothing of the multiple deducted miner fees, and they are threatening my personal information release to the public as an incentive to return said money. That amounts to EXTORTION. I honestly don't even care about the money, and will most likely eat the lost miner fees because my information being private is more important to me than a few bucks. But this type of behavior from a company claiming to want to

Our mission is to empower people financially and make the world more open and connected.

is unacceptable.

What I also find interesting is that they seem to be threatening to violate their own terms of service!

And while I have respected this portion, I find it interesting that it doesn't seem to apply to them.

I invested money in this platform as an experiment. A day or two prior to this hack, I released a post detailing my experience with the platform and thoughts on it up to that point, which were positive. My opinion on this company has since soured. Not because I think they are a scam operation, but because they are exhibiting some horrible business practices. I get it, they got hacked, they're scrambling to hold their company together, but you do NOT punish your legitimate customers for your failure to shore up your digital security.

So with all that said, I just want to say here that this post is not one to ask for sympathy in any way. Crypto investing is risky. Platforms with high yield returns even moreso. I simply wanted to bring attention to what is going on because information beyond the back and forth screaming match of "it's a scam!" and "no it's not!" is so difficult to find.