CRIMINAL DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE BY PROBIT EXCHANGE EXPOSED
In one single act, Probit’s self-proclaimed boss, Jake Lee exposed the anathema centralised exchanges are to the crypto space.
Social media has exploded with the disgust at the action of Jake Lee, who, after completing the fraud on NuGenesis and keeping listing fee and marketing fee it scammed for doing nothing, then decided to destroy all the evidence of the communications. The criminal act was a perversion of the course of justice to ensure that regulators and courts would be deprived of the necessary evidence that NuGenesis would rely. Fortunately, NuGenesis already had secured a copy.
The fascination of Jake Lee’s criminal act of destroying evidence is abhorrent to the crypto revolution which is about immutable transactions. The crypto revolution is fuelled by the promise of decentralisation and trustless transactions, yet most transactions go through centralised transactions and as the Probit case study shows, are at the mercy of rogues who simply steal your money and brazenly tell you there is nothing you can do because they are out of reach in a tax haven like Seychelles.
Is Probit looting an exception or do all centralised exchanges succumb, at least a little, to the power over money, assets and records they can abuse at a whim?
The case study of Probit arises from current litigation prosecuted by NuGenesis in Estonia against the Probit exchange. Probit Exchange OU was licensed to provide “a virtual currency wallet service” in Estonia between 17.02.2020 until 21.07.2021. It failed to meet the standards necessary to keep its licence and instead, incorporated PROBIT GLOBAL SERVICES Limited in the Seychelles to jointly conduct Probit Exchange. The standards of Seychelles, being rock bottom, were befitting of this tax haven and money laundering centre and suitable to Probit.
The case is pretty simple. The exchange approached NuGenesis to list NuCoin. It charged $US140,000 in listing fees, and boasting its strong Korean presence and having some sort of approval from the Korean authorities (which it does not). Probit took the money and did nothing. It appears it did not have the capacity to integrate.
NuGenesis, relying on Probit’s misrepresentations invested in promoting launch and suffered damages, including losing premium investors when Probit repeatedly failed to deliver. Probit did and does not have the financial capacity to return fees. Instead, Jake Lee, effectively told NuGenesis to go screw itself, Probit is in a tax haven and can’t be touched. Then, the self-proclaimed Probit boss, destroyed all the evidence logs.
There is the quintessential problem with the crypto industry, in a nutshell. We are all, more or less, at the whim of centralised exchanges to the extent they choose to indulge. It may be more sophisticated, such as ‘front running’ their order book to manipulate the price and take out their leveraged clients causing cascading liquidations. Or it may be low level plain and simply theft as the Probit case study shows. With the simple act of destroying the evidence, you have no chance to find justice and satisfaction, even if you were to throw more money at lawyers in tax havens.
Regulators see regulation as the solution to the problem. But without centralised exchanges, there would not be a problem in the first place to require a solution. NuGenesis has “gone postal” on this mission, because it is promoting decentralized ledgering systems, and decentralised exchanges, DEX like LedgerX as true alternatives to replacing these corrupt centralised exchanges. Ledger X is a fully fledged fiat-crypto exchange achieving speeds greater than the centralised exchanges. Records are immutable, users keep their keys and their crypto under their exclusive control, and there is no central point of attack for hackers or those seeking to compel private information.
As the Probit Fraud saga plays out, we will see that Probit, who simply cannot front a court with any credibility when it has destroyed the evidence in contemptuous disregard of the court it seeks to convince and claim it is entitled to steal money. Its only moves will be to hide, delay and hope that NuGenesis runs out of money pursuing them. How this will play out will be fascinating for the future of the crypto market.