What Happened Yesterday? A Statement
To Whom It May Concern, We are avid fans of the XRP community and do our best to make sure that the XRP fans (and anyone, really) who come into contact with ChangeNOW in any way are safe and sound. During our existence, we have managed to prevent more than $1m worth of XRP from being stolen through hacks and scams. Unfortunately, this is a reality we have to live with; there are tons of malicious agents on the Internet who are out for your money. The best thing we can do is stay vigilant of them. Right now, there’s a customer of ours who has been suspected of illicit activity; we got the information from our colleagues in the crypto compliance industry who we are in regular contact with. Right now, an investigation is being conducted - the customer’s funds are in cold storage while we take all the necessary actions according to our AML compliance procedures. The investigation involves several parties and will last for some time: we have to contact the victims, get the necessary info from them, verify the information we got, and redirect the requests to the police. Withholding funds is a last-ditch measure for us as we suspect this money to have been obtained through a scam. If the investigation concludes that no fraudulent activities took place, we will immediately release the funds. We understand how inconvenient it may be for the customer, but letting stolen funds be processed through our service seems like an even less desirable alternative and a disservice to the community. This customer has been trying to compromise our website and service with DDoS attacks for more than 24 hours and counting – thus, we’d like to apologize to everyone who has run into difficulties while using our website. During this time, we power-leveled our back end and improved the overall website defenses, so in a way we must thank them for the opportunity to take the quality of our service up a notch. We are even thinking about rewarding them with some tokens, now that they, albeit inadvertently, still took part in it. We value the safety and security of the crypto community above all – so all of this doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. If at least one person who was scammed gets their money back, it’s all worth the effort. Here’s a PSA from us to you: there are tons of scams out there. We advise everyone to collaborate with crypto services when it comes to AML checking – that way, we can make the crypto sphere just that much safer. Stay safe, stay vigilant, and you will be just fine; we, in the meantime, will stand guard. Cheers!
