The users of the prominent cryptocurrency exchange, Paxful was recently subject to extreme angst as rumors pertaining to a data breach on the platform surfaced. However, the CEO of the exchange asserted that the platform was safe and had experienced no such thing.
The emergence of digitalization with regard to the financial sphere is promising, however, quite often platforms associated with this fall prey to hacks and attacks. While the crypto industry has witnessed an array of hacks, an online market, Raid Forums solely for the purpose of selling and buying of stolen data has been established. A user of the Raid Forum reportedly claimed to have personal data of over 4.8 million Paxful users. This included names, email addresses, gender, phone number, birth dates as well as passwords.
Recently, social media giant, Facebook had also experienced a data breach. However, in this case, the seller, who used the name, Mafufi demanded 1 Bitcoin [BTC] which was about $60K, during the time of writing.
The news about the exchange being hacked gave rise to another conversation that emphasized the emergence of these hacks despite Know Your Customer [KYC] and Anti-Money Laundering [AML] procedures. Addressing the same, the CEO of Paxful, Ray Youssef said,
“Neither does Paxful. Any KYC data is never on our servers. We don’t take asking for people’s identities lightly. Good news soon”
Paxful CEO: “Ignore the FUD”
While this caused unrest in the crypto community, the CEO of the platform, Ray Youssef restored hope by affirming that no user data was leaked. His tweet read,
“All funds and Identities are Safe @paxful No user data was leaked, no breach was ever made of our users! Ignore the FUD! long live #bitcoin The data they had was old employee records from a payroll site we no longer use. #badguysdontwin”
Furthermore, the users of the exchange were put at ease post this tweet.