Gate.io denies withholding evidence in $1.7M theft case

Crypto exchange Gate.io has been accused of withholding evidence and delaying a police investigation into the theft of a user’s $1.7 million worth of crypto.

Gate.io’s Chinese X account has denied the allegations put forward by user “Jheioff,” whose Gate account was drained on July 8. 

Jheioff claims that, despite using phone verification, Google’s two-step authenticator, and email verification, they weren’t alerted to the attack. 

They said, “My phone never received any SMS verification codes, and I’ve never provided video footage, handheld ID photos, or login screen recordings to anyone.”

Read more: Gate.io to compensate users for outage losses — but there’s a catch

Jheioff filed a criminal case on July 17 but subsequently accused Gate of “deflecting and delaying” and claims that, 10 days after filing the case, the exchange still hasn’t submitted video facial data or risk control information. 

Gate, on the other hand, called Jheioff’s claims “unfounded accusations,” and instead says it has prioritised their case. 

Jheioff says Gate is hindering crypto theft investigation

In an X post translated from Chinese, Jheioff said that once the case was filed, they asked the exchange for every document required by police.

They claim authorities then sent Gate the case filing decision, the IDs of two police officers, the judicial evidence request letter, and other related documents.

However, Gate allegedly wanted a PDF version from Jheioff. When sent a compressed PDF, they told Jheioff that they would need to re-upload as a proper PDF file while citing virus risks. 

Jheioff claims the company then suggested could be submitting false documents, and that the police officers may be imposters. As such, it then said it would require a video confirming their identities.  

“I made a special trip to the public security bureau to cooperate,” Jheioff says, “but Gate then claimed they could only do voice verification at that time and couldn’t do video.

Read more: Crypto exchanges too slow to react to RAVE collapse, ZachXBT

“Finally, they claimed that ‘the materials are incomplete’ and ‘some documents have expired,’ but failed to provide a single list specifying the missing materials, expired documents, correction standards, and processing deadlines.”

Jheioff added, “I’m baffled — you guys have so many issues. I asked in advance to clarify the details of the summons; why didn’t you mention any of this back then? Now you’re using these trivial details to stall and shirk responsibility — it really comes in handy.”

Gate claims Jheioff is the one delaying

Gate suggests that it’s actually Jheioff doing most of the delaying. 

On the day of the incident, the company claims that Jheioff was “very slow,” and “consistently refused our assistance” when it came to filing a case and providing legal resources to help. 

It said that after Jheioff informed it of the filing on July 17, it took another five days for it to receive an inquiry letter. It also claimed that the July 22 letter was missing documents, had expired credentials, couldn’t be verified, and lacked official contact information.

Then, on July 24, Gate says the given official contact phone number “was a personal line, the email was a personal account, and there were inconsistencies between the case description and the incident details,” and as such, it “immediately replied requesting a video call for verification and confirmation.”

“As of July 27, three days have passed, and we still have not received a specific schedule for the video verification,” Gate claims, adding that if Jheioff had cooperated, this step could’ve been resolved within a day. 

As for the PDF, it says it clearly stated that it needed to be in the PDF format, and that Jheioff sent a document compression package instead.

Gate and Jheioff previously argued over the details of the hack, with Jheioff denying that all the logged security changes in the run-up to the draining were their doing. 

Indeed, Gate maintained in its response to Jheioff today that the incident wasn’t the result of leaked data, which Jheioff suggests caused the drain.

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