WASHINGTON, March 4 (UPI) -- Flexcoin, a relatively small bitcoin bank, said Tuesday that hackers had robbed all the bitcoins in their possession and were shutting down immediately.
The announcement comes days after Mt. Gox, one of the largest bitcoin exchanges, filed for bankruptcy protection after losing 744,000 bitcoins valued at $425 million. In sharp contrast, Flexcoin was robbed of all 896 of its bitcoins, valued at a little less than $620,000.
"On March 2nd 2014 Flexcoin was attacked and robbed of all coins in the hot wallet. The attacker made off with 896 BTC, dividing them into these two addresses," the bitcoin bank said in a statement. "As Flexcoin does not have the resources, assets, or otherwise to come back from this loss, we are closing our doors immediately."
According to Flexcoin's terms of service, the company, its stakeholders and shareholders are not liable for ensuring the security of bitcoins stored in the system. Flexcoin did have some cold storage bitcoins that it would return to the respective owners after verifying their identities.
Ironically, the company had announced last week after Mt. Gox's collapse that while what had happened to Mt. Gox was unfortunate, they had not lost anything.
[Flexcoin] [USAToday] [The Wire]
