Crypto.com restarts withdrawals after suspending them over 'suspicious activity' that hit customer accounts

markets.businessinsider.com:

Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Crypto exchange Crypto.com started allowing customers to make withdrawals again, having suspended them Monday while it investigated reports that accounts had been broken into.

The Singapore-based exchange halted withdrawals after getting reports of suspicious activity on accounts, it said on Twitter.

The Crypto.com move came after worried customers said their funds had been compromised in posts to social media platforms. Entrepreneur and crypto enthusiast Ben Baller tweeted that he had 4.28 in ether, worth around $14,000 at the time according to CoinMarketCap data, taken from his wallet.

After a 14-hour outage, the company said Monday that withdrawal services had been restored, but warned it would take time to clear the backlogs. «This update will be rolled out to users progressively over the next few hours. Once complete, withdrawals will be re-enabled,» it said in a tweet.

Crypto.com said it had beefed up the exchange's two-factor authentication and advised people to update the security tool on its app.

The exchange's CEO Kris Marszalek took to Twitter in the early hours of Tuesday morning to deny that any customer funds had been lost.

«Some thoughts from me on the last 24 hours: no customer funds were lost, the downtime of withdrawal infra was ~ 14 hours, our team has hardened the infrastructure in response to the incident,» he said. «We will share a post-mortem after the internal investigation is completed.»

The issue comes at a difficult time for Crypto.com as the exchange comes under scrutiny for its advertising practices. The United Kingdom's advertising watchdog banned two promos in January, saying they were irresponsible and misleading for consumers. 

In November, Crypto.com