They refunded someone? who knows?

You think the owners of Bitfinex will get out of this unharmed? I don't. I think they are headed to pound-me-in-the-ass prison if the US (world police) ever find them. You can't serve massive numbers of US customers, haircut their account balances based on dubious numbers with no relation to actual lost assets, issue and securitize a non-interest-bearing debt note which offers zero rights, and then continue business as usual.

In any common law jurisdiction, they are guilty of theft and illegal asset conversion. There are also likely legitimate fraud allegations, considering they have been completely non-transparent. For example, Phil Potter let it slip a couple days ago that they retained 10-13% of reserves for operating expenses and a legal slush fund to protect themselves from customer lawsuits.

This is outright theft, and despite no transparency, they still come right out and say it.

FBI seizure incoming. Whether tomorrow or next month. Pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

I'm not surprised about any of that in the slightest. I'm glad I'd already taken my money out of Bitfinex to invest in XMG on Polo a few weeks before the hack. Didn't think the GUI was as intuitive either.

hong kong originally. now I think their legal base is the british virgin islands, the servers are in milan and the staff are all over the world. I think there's some scope for legal moves in there somewhere.

The weak link in their structure is their web registration. They can hide, but they may not be able to keep operating if law enforcement targets a) Bitfinex.com or b) Bitfinex's bank accounts.

If their domain gets seized, it's game over. What are they gonna do -- act like torrent tracker sites and spring up on a new domain every few weeks? Completely unsustainable. Anyone who still has funds on Bitfinex (including BFX tokens) is playing with fire.

How do we know their volume isn't being faked to entice customers to return?

that's why we have a thread warning about exchanges, just don't keep money on an exchange that isn't trusted. besides, bitfinex doesn't have licenses as said above.

at least it doesn't affect to the users of the exchange only, but also to all of us because the price was down.

That's gonna work out well. Western users are going to be flocking to deposit money into an insolvent, hacked exchange that just had its domain seized by the US government. And on a .ru domain.

I agree that it would be game over. At that point, Bitfinex is more than likely to have some of its USD bank accounts seized anyway.

I mean, why didn't Full Tilt Poker just spring up on .ru when the US shut them down?

This happened because Pokerstars and Full Tilt were using the same illegal banking mechanisms to fraudulently transmit money to US customers (e.g. coding money transmission as retail sports shop sales). Pokerstars executives were facing prison time; fortunately for them, Full Tilt left a giant hole in US customer pockets that the feds wanted Pokerstars to fill.

Full Tilt would never have been bought by Pokerstars otherwise. They were completely insolvent because they allowed "phantom deposits" on their site for many months without being able to physically receive money from US customers.

Full Tilt did not have $400 million, LOL. They had $5 million in their bank accounts at time of shutdown (more money was clawed back from executives like Ray Bitar). Um, and Full Tilt executives plead guilty to multiple charges. Given that they took $40 million from Bitar and his multiple homes -- no, Full Tilt did not shit on the US government. The judge also expressed that he only avoided prison by having a serious heart issue that require(d/s) a heart transplant; it was believed at the time he only had a couple years to live.  

The US government had an interest in Pokerstars buying Full Tilt; this would compensate all US customer losses. There is no such Cinderella story here. The US government leveraged prison time and asset forfeitures against Pokerstars. That's the only reason Full Tilt was bought and customers made whole. But why the hell would anyone buy Bitfinex?

No serious investor would touch Bitfinex now given that they have now stolen and redistributed customer funds (illegal asset conversion under common law) and securitized a debt note (illegal in many jurisdictions including the US).