There was once a Russian based exchange called BTC-E which closed down after an insider there named Alexander Vinnik was charged with laundering billions - currently the US, France, and Russia are fighting over who gets to extradite him and put him behind bars.
The BTC-E exchange was also allegedly connected to black market darknet drug dealers from the now busted Silk Road - basically, BTC-E was a favorite exchange among the shady members of the crypto underworld.
Flash forward to today, BTC-E re-launched under the name WEX - and the shady business seems to have started up again. They're showing Bitcoin trading at $8151, while other exchanges are showing it somewhere around $6400.
Traders in various crypto forums and telegram channels are suspecting an exit scam may be coming - the price manipulation could be to attract gullible arbitrage traders. That is, when Bitcoin is selling higher on one exchange than another, you could in theory purchase Bitcoin for $6400 from somewhere like coinbase, send the coins to WEX, then sell them at a huge profit with little effort - perhaps WEX is hoping people start sending their BTC over for this reason, then the site will simply disappear.
WEX has already given users a heads up for planned downtime for "maintiance" tomorrow June 12th.
Avoid this one.
Author: Oliver Redding
Seattle News Desk
