Cryptocurrency news of the day comes from Vietnam, where Sky Mining CEO allegedly stole $35 million in funds belonging to the company and investors. News was broken by VNExpress on July 29.
VNExpress states that Le Minh Tam, Sky Mining CEO, basically disappeared around one week ago. At the same time, it appeared that a company assets cleanout was organized. It was also added that Tam did apologize on Facebook to the investors while explaining that the profitability of Sky Mining went down because of the volatility of the market. Until now, He was not found by authorities or anyone else.
The reason why it is believed that Le Minh Tam ran away with the funds is that he did tell investors to go to the headquarters of the company in order to regain capital. After that, he would file for bankruptcy. What happened is that investors practically found the Ho Chi Minh City Sky Mining headquarters closed. Al signage was removed.
It was also mentioned that the 600 miners that worked for the company, which were accommodated in another district, were moved away by people that were officially identified as maintenance workers.
Sky Mining deputy chairman, Le Minh Hieu, formed a special board that is dedicated to assisting the investors that lost money in the process. At the same time, the board needs to assess the remaining asset value and what losses appeared.
As noted by Hieu, he cannot give exact details about assets. This is because Tam was the only one in charge of mining rigs. However, estimates are that investors lost around $35 million. It is believed that Tam left the country, probably towards US. Hieu added:
The board has reported this to the police and showed evidence that we are not guilty. We are victims too.
Out of the investors, twenty also filed official complaints with the local police.
Unfortunately, Vietnam is recently hit by many different scams and problems related to cryptocurrencies. Just 3 months ago we saw a major Ponzi scheme that collapse. It used 2 fake ICOs that led to 32,000 people losing a huge amount of money, around $600 million.
Due to all the crypto problems, the authorities actually banned the local companies from activities that are related to crypto. At the start of the month we also saw that the Vietnamese central bank now supports banning imports that are associated with anything related to cryptocurrency mining.
