After over a month of silence on the issue, payment processor EgoPay has updated the public on the status of frozen funds and the state of their business.
The company handles funds for several cryptocurrency exchanges. Starting late last year, the company had faced mounting complaints over frozen funds, and was apparently unresponsive to inquiries.
In a blog post that simply leaves you shaking your head, the company now says that it suffered a hack during the last December holiday period. Transactions were also fabricated, giving merchants the false impression that their accounts had been credited. EgoPay says it immediately put restrictions in place and switched their processing from automatic to manual.
Suspecting that "this hack must have been perpetrated by someone from within who knew the inner workings and had privileged access," any suspected employee was suspended while the investigation was ongoing. This resulted in practically no capacity to handle client inquiries. An investigative team was apparently called in, which asked "for certain accesses in order to do their job, but it was not forthcoming." Thereafter:
"On January 5th, 2015 it was uncovered that the owner of Egopay (Amir Aziz) who operated behind the scenes was embezzling money from the company for a period of time. We took immediate action to restrict all his accesses as well. Between January 5th and 16th, the remaining Egopay employees (Tadas & team) did not know who to trust anymore."
Eventually, an investigative team was granted access. A few days later, however, "Amir Aziz social engineered his way with the Hosting provider to reset his accesses and grant him access again to the servers which he used, in turn, to delete his Egopay account from the system (we would assume to cover his scheme) and removed all other Administrative accesses."
Citing its failure to keep clients in the loop, the company apologizes and says that CEO Tadas Kasputis has resigned.
It is a tale bearing some Alex Green/Ryan Kennedy vibes. A post on SiliconAngle explores the company's background in more detail and alleges that the (former) CEO has a long track record of scams and Ponzi schemes.
