PANews reported on August 13 that according to Cointelegraph, a team set up by the British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC), a provincial regulator in Canada, found that Canadian crypto trading platform ezBtc and its founder David Smillie misappropriated about 13 million Canadian dollars (9.5 million U.S. dollars) of cryptocurrency investments from customers and used the funds for gambling, thereby defrauding customers. It is reported that the ezBtc platform was permanently offline around September 2019 and disbanded in 2022. The platform claimed to store all users' cryptocurrency investments in cold wallets.
According to the BCSC panel, Smillie misappropriated nearly a third of user funds for gambling and personal use: ezBtc transferred a total of 935.46 Bitcoin and 159 Ethereum to Smillie's exchange account and/or CloudBet and FortuneJack. The transfers to the two gambling sites were sometimes made directly from ezBtc, and sometimes indirectly from ezBtc to Smillie's exchange account and then to the gambling sites. The "deceptive practices" carefully planned by Smillie and ezBtc resulted in "actual losses" because customers were unable to withdraw their assets.
