A retirement account trust company is suing the crypto exchange Gemini for failing to have the “proper safeguards in place” to protect its customers’ assets.
IRA Financial Trust alleges hackers stole $36 million in crypto assets belonging to their customers’ retirement accounts which were reportedly in Gemini’s custody.
The South Dakota-based trust company has pledged to use proceeds from the lawsuit to reimburse the impacted customers. The firm claims Gemini’s Application Programming Interface (API) had a single point of failure, and that the exchange’s system had a “sweeping vulnerability that allowed for a breach of a single customer account to metastasize across all accounts.”
IRA Financial Trust also alleges Gemini failed to freeze the accounts immediately following the incident, even after the trust company notified the exchange of the hack.
“Gemini permitted these transfers to occur and, contrary to its representations, did not detect them with anti-fraud systems. Amazingly, it was IRA that had to alert Gemini – the so-called leader in safeguarding crypto-assets – of the obvious fraud occurring on Gemini’s platform…
And IRA did not have the ability to freeze crypto accounts. Thus, once IRA discovered the hack, it was left to frantically email Gemini – again and again – to get all accounts frozen. Remarkably, it took six emails from IRA and nearly two hours for Gemini to freeze all customer accounts. In the interim, millions of dollars in crypto assets were stolen.”
This is Gemini’s second publicized lawsuit this month: last week, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CTFC) announced it had brought charges against the exchange, alleging employees made false and incomplete statements to the agency.
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