Whether good or bad, Binance seems to be in the news a lot lately. Today was definitely due to the latter. Quite a few people had some interesting issues with their accounts and their coins being auto-sold for Bitcoin. Other users reported their accounts placing orders for specific coins (VIA being one of them) at multiple times the current market value.
Binance has commented saying that the issues stemmed from users who have Application Programming Interface (API) keys setup in their accounts and that the exchange itself was not compromised. They were quick to act on the situation and disabled withdrawals while they investigated to safeguard any compromised funds. Within a few hours they were able to locate the irregular trades and will be reversing all devious transactions to recover the funds for users.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao Tweeted saying, “All funds are safe. There were irregularities in trading activity, automatic alarms triggered. Some accounts may have been compromised by phishing from before. We are still investigating. All funds are safe.”
He followed up with a warning that we all must properly learn to secure our accounts from phishing. In a time where us crypto enthusiasts are “our own bank” we must be extremely diligent with our security practices.
