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Former Moolah CEO Ryan Kennedy has been busted by the UK Police for stealing around $1.8 million worth of Bitcoin from demised cryptocurrency exchange MintPal.
The self-proclaimed scammer, who was hiding behind the identity of Alex Green all this time, was exposed last year by Dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer. In the midst of all this was MintPal, which was then recovering from the wounds of a $2m theft. Kennedy’s company Moolah later acquired the exchange to rebuild it from scratch, by specially focusing on its security.
As MintPal shareholder Ferdous Bhai was briefly quoted back in 2014, he was expecting Moolah & Team to bring major reforms to their exchange platform. Bhai, alongside his partner Mike Chu, thus granted this anonymous identity “Green” a 35% share of the company.
The things started to go south thereon. MintPal, upon its launch, faced a series of systematic and security issues, leaving many of its users sidelines even to operate their respective accounts. The site struggled to breathe for first six days since the relaunch, and eventually died on the seventh. “Critical issue”, as Kennedy was found quoting.
Followed by the MintPal failure, Kennedy further declared Moolah as a bankrupt company. A few days later after his original identity was revealed as an ex-scammer, he drove down into shades with MintPal’s money (around 3,700 BTC), a chunk of which also contained the customers’ funds.
After Alex “Ryan” Green disappeared with the aforesaid amount, both Bhai and Chu decided to take the entire matter to court. They were further helped by a legal firm representing Syscoin — another victim of the MintPal scam. The former meanwhile tried every bit of his PR skill to stay in the game, probably after the legal threat, and wrote an apologetic note, saying:
“I know sorry isn’t good enough. I know I have fucked up on a catastrophic level. There should have been better procedures in place.”
This was his last public statement.
Investigation and Aftermath
A study done by the site MintPal Justice later found that the hacked Bitcoins were sold by a pseudo-identity LemonadeDev — which later proved to be nobody but Kennedy.
After studying the available evidences, the UK court commanded Kennedy to repay the amount to their original owners which, as we found, was never complied by him. This was the only reason he got arrested by the UK Police on first place.
“We are permitted to disclose that both Ryan Kennedy and Chelsea Hopkins were arrested by UK authorities,” Syscoin said on its blog. “We’re working with UK authorities, UK courts, Interpol and the legal bodies to resolve this properly and make sure any wrong doing is met with the full force of UK Justice.”
And the story broke loose.
We will keep you updated with the proceedings of this news. Kindly stay connected.
