Major BTC exchange Coinbase was hit with two federal class action lawsuits in just two days. One of them is the result of a possible insider training on Bitcoin Cash (BCH) back in December 2017. This was filed on the 1st of March, it states that one of the employees of the exchange illegally profited by trading on insider information, more precisely during the introduction of BCH to the exchange platform. The complaint was filed by Jeffrey Berk and a group of Coinbase customers. The lawsuit alleges that the price of BCH was artificially pumped, causing customers a massive loss, at least for those who traded Bitcoin Cash during its introduction to the exchange:

“ On December 19, 2017, a month after tipping off its own employees as to when it would commence fully supporting BCH, Coinbase suddenly announced that it was opening up its books to the buying and selling of BCH within minutes after its announcements.

Unsurprisingly, those who had been tipped off, immediately swamped Coinbase and the GDAX with buy and sell orders, thinning the liquidity but obtaining BCH at fair prices. The market effect was to unfairly drive up the price of BCH for non-insider traders once BCH came on line on the Coinbase exchange.”

They also added:

“When Coinbase’s customers’ trades were finally executed, it was only after the insiders had driven up the price of BCH, and thus the remaining bitcoin customers only received their BCH at artificially inflated prices that had been manipulated well beyond the fair market value of BCH at that time.”

The incident is nothing new as Coinbase had an announcement up after the incident where they stated that they will investigate the case of possible insider trading, but it seems that some of the users who were damaged in the above mentioned case didn’t want to wait further.

In case this wouldn’t be enough, a second lawsuit was filed a day later, accusing Coinbase with “unlawful and unfair business practices”. The filing was done on behalf of Timothy G. Faasse and Jeffrey Hansen. They accused Coinbase with keeping the funds which didn’t belong to them. Users have an option to send funds through emails via Coinbase to their contacts, when the receivers didn’t claim these coins Coinbase didn’t send out a notice together with the coins back to the senders, but instead kept them according to the document.

Let’s hope that Coinbase can sort out these issues as they already had a hard time with trying to please their customers. We have covered a few of their past problems in two articles:



Coinbase is trying to earn back the trust of its users | Users of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase are experiencing major problems, unexpected charges are draining their bank accounts.