A little known crypto exchange in Canada declared today that it’s been hacked and lost all its funds. This could not be stunning news, but what makes this announcement surprising is that the exchange quickly declared that it was closing down.

The Alberta Canada situated company MapleChange denoted on Twitter that it lost all its funds because of a bug in its system. It went on to say that it had no more funds to pay anyone.

The curious submission by any standard was followed by deletion of the Twitter account of the exchange which has less than 2000 followers. The claim that they were unable to make payments made one commenter ask what Twitter charges are considering that they deleted the account. People felt it was a pointer that there was more happening behind the scene than meets the eye.

Exit scams are present realities not only within crypto circles but all sorts of businesses that keep people’s money. Its preponderance in cryptosphere has been remarkable in recent times.

What makes the MapleChange exit scam exceptional is that it’s atypical of scammers to use exchanges as channel of thieving. There are several different niches they favor such a gambling.

More so, what may be considered the maturation time for such scams is longer than most scammers are willing to have patience for.

As rare as this could be, the MapleChange ‘hack’ has all the signs of scam since there’s no valid reason for the firm to delete its social media accounts.

Exchange hacks are nothing new in the industry, so the tendency has traditionally been to apply remedial measures whenever the unfortunate circumstance arises. This year, there has been a minimum of three hacks affecting exchanges and there has never been a state of affairs warranting deletion of social media accounts.

By their action, the promoters of MapleChange merely established that it was a planned fraud initiated for same purpose. The pause between the announcement of the ‘hack’ and deletion of the accounts proves this. 

Another indication that the announcement was part of a wider plan was the timing. Being a Sunday morning, the exchange operators were aware that most users wouldn’t be in business mood at the time of the announcement and that several others would be sound asleep reckoning time zones.

An analysis of the website shows that its domain was registered at GoDaddy by one Flavius P. In recent weeks, its analytics has seen a spike in activities indicative that the business has gained more customers.

Responding to the MapleChange ‘hack’, a Twitter user Matt Odell wrote,

“Looks like they deleted their account. I figured they would since they also deleted their discord and some other social media accounts. My guess is this was an inside job/exit scam connected to the recent site upgrade.”

Well, this is people’s money we are talking about. Hopefully the law enforcement agencies would move in to investigate culpability soon.