In what has been one strange and cryptic piece of news after another about the troubles that Cryptsy and its founder have been surrounded by, an update of the class action lawsuit against them has been released and it expands the subjects of whom is liable for the lost assets over the past year and a half.
In what seems to be a mixture of both information compiled from Cryptsy’s last updates of their blog, the founder Paul Vernon’s Twitter account and some individually investigated findings, the class-action lawsuit’s updates increase the level of criminal allegations against Cryptsy substantially.
In the updated class-action lawsuit [PDF] originally filed by Silver Law Group, more details were released support the original assertions leveled against Vernon and Cryptsy. These details stem from his recent divorce filings with ex-wife Lorie Ann Nettles. Nettles, whose name is now listed among the defendants with Vernon and Cryptsy, divorced from Vernon a few months after they made an all-cash purchase of a $1,374,881 waterfront mansion in Palm Beach County, Florida in March 2015.
This added information is alarming due to the nature of the timeline and publicized information that Vernon has publicly admitted to on his company blog, on Twitter and as well in several court documents which show Vernon’s admittance that Cryptsy was insolvent and likely to go out of business.
Vernon attempted to claim that he was attempting to locate the funds through his own brand of vigilante justice on his blog and that he was nervous to disclose to authorities that his company had lost $5,000,000 in Bitcoin of their customer’s assets. He’s also made small attempts to show that Cryptsy is slowly working to open up and un-freeze some wallets within their system so that some customers can withdraw remaining funds.
However, the class-action lawsuit suggests that all of this is a complex, but not well-masked ploy on behalf of Vernon and his ex-wife Nettles to move assets away from Cryptsy into private hands so that when the company did go under, Nettles would be in possession of a large amount of the $5,000,000 which went missing through Vernon’s activities.
The lawsuit makes no qualms about stating outright that those filing this claim don’t believe anything that Vernon has said about being the victim of online theft and that he has in fact stolen this money for his and in extension, his ex-wife’s personal use.
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