Coincheck Faces More Class Actions Over Missing Crypto

Following a massive hack last month, Coincheck is reportedly facing more legal pressure from investors seeking the return of their digital assets. Sankei, a Japanese media outlet, stated an additional 132 investors have joined a class action suit, according to news from Coindesk.

Investors who joined the suit, which was filed in Tokyo District Court on Feb. 27, are seeking about $2.1 million in cryptocurrency. That suit comes after one brought on by seven customers of Coincheck on Feb. 15. In the case, the customers were seeking $183,000 in damages with 5 percent interest on an annualized basis until they could receive their refunds.

The news comes about a month after Coincheck, one of Japan’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, said that about $400 million worth of NEM coins went missing from its platform. At the time, Coincheck Inc. said 500 million NEM tokens were sent “illicitly” out of the exchange. As a result, the exchange halted withdrawals, non-bitcoin trades and deposits into NEM coins.

In late January, Coincheck said it would reimburse customers up to ¥46.3 billion ($426 million) due to the hack. The approximately 260,000 affected customers were to be paid back in Japanese yen at a rate of 88.549 yen per NEM. There was no word on when the customers could expect to receive their payments, but the funds will reportedly be repaid via Coincheck Wallet.

Coincheck explained in a blog post at the time that it calculated the repayment rate based on “the prices during the period beginning with the suspension of new purchases and sales of NEM on the Coincheck platform and ending with the release of this notice.”

But some on Twitter were unimpressed with the rate. They believed the company should pay back customers at the earlier, higher rate, or reimburse them in NEM instead of yen.

Coincheck’s hack brings back memories of Mt. Gox, the now-defunct bitcoin exchange that shuttered in Feb. 2014 after a mysterious “glitch” caused $500 million worth of bitcoin to go missing. Those bitcoin — or at least most of them — have remained missing ever since. As for the exchange itself, it eventually went bankrupt.