The exchange office will send its clients a statement, via email, explaining the situation and some steps to follow in case of having any pending operation.
Bitcoin ChileBit, the renewed Chilean cryptocurrency exchange house, surprised its users recently with a notice of temporary suspension of services.
In an announcement made through the social network Twitter, the exchange company reported that its services are temporarily frozen and that they will send more detailed information to customers via email. “Fees and withdrawals temporarily are frozen. Soon we will send a notice by mail to everyone”, says the tweet.
This notice of suspension of services arose after the Bank of Credit and Investments (BCI) closed the bank accounts of members of the board. Therefore, it is believed that the operational continuity of the stock market is at risk.
In a recent interview, conducted by a news web portal, Tiago Struck, who is CEO of ChileBit, announced that at the moment they are focused on conducting measures that help provide answers to all those clients who had already made some operations on the platform, and that by the measure, have been pending. Thus, Tiago Struck said that they will send customers an email explaining the situation and the steps they should take to finalize the operation.
Based on responding to customers, Struck said that at the moment they do not have accounts with other banking institutions; thus, they have turned to business partners to solve part of the situation.
“The exchanges in Chilean pesos (CLP) are temporarily frozen because we do not have accounts with other banks to process them. However, we have talked with some market partners who are with us since the beginning of our operations and we agreed that they will maintain sales orders open, those with CLP can buy bitcoins and process the withdrawal to settle it elsewhere”.
In this way, Struck explained that the bitcoin buying and selling platform will be enabled next week so that it can finish processing the operations that were left behind. But he clarified that this process will have some margin of slowness since the accounts of its partners will be used. They estimate that they can resolve all cases not exceeding more than three days.
About the blockade of accounts, the CEO of the exchange company explained that all operations were paralyzed without any warning. This happens since, due to a failure in the notification issued by the bank, the notice did not arrive on time. It should have been sent last December 19, 2019.
With this failure in the communication by the financial institution, the necessary corrections could not be taken, Struck explained.
“Everything took us by surprise, so we could not anticipate the situation and take preventive measures. The closure of the account came to our knowledge when we failed to access the account and when asking our executive what was happening, he sent us a letter”, said the CEO of ChileBit.
According to the statement sent by the banking institution to ChileBit, the exchange office does not comply with the rules of knowing the origin of the money for the purchase and sale of cryptocurrencies.
About this aspect, Tiago argued that they have always complied with all the necessary rules for the prevention of money laundering, as well as the procedure known as “Know your client”. They also see with concern that the bank also blocked the account of another company which is owned by one of its partners.
“We are 100 % solvent, both in BTC and in Chilean pesos. However, all this has not been enough for the bank. We are currently in a legal consultation with our lawyers to determine how we can unlock the account. We are a platform that has been operating for a whilst, but we are still small and any decision can affect us so that closing operations is one possibility”.
By María Rodríguez
