Two class action lawsuits have been filed against major cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase on successive days last week.
In the first lawsuit, filed on March 1, the plaintiffs accuse that the employees of the California-based exchange illegally profited by “insider trading” of the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) launched in December.
The complaint was filed by Coinbase user and Arizona citizen Jeffrey Berk on behalf of himself and a group of Coinbase customers in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Coinbase has been accused of artificially inflating prices by means of disclosing buy and sell orders shortly after the exchange rolled out Bitcoin Cash support on December 19.
The plaintiffs alleged that Coindesk tipped off its own employees a month earlier as to when it would commence fully supporting BCH.
Berk is demanding a jury trial for losses incurred to him and the other customers involved, and unspecified monetary damages.
The second class action lawsuit was filed on March 2 by Timothy G. Faasse and Jeffrey Hansen on behalf of themselves and a set of customers.
The lawsuit accuses Coinbase of both violating California’s Unclaimed Property Law and conducting unlawful and unfair business practices.
Coinbase has been accused of allowing its users to send Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash to external email addresses — as opposed to cryptocurrency wallets. The emails would come with a link allowing the recipient to create a Coinbase account and redeem their cryptocurrency.
But until 2017, the recipients generally had no idea of a Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, so most of these emails were disregarded. And most of the Cryptocurrency went unclaimed.
Instead of notifying the customers they had unclaimed Cryptocurrencies, or turning those Cryptocurrencies over to the State of California, Coinbase opted to keep them.
This is in violation of Unclaimed Property Law, the lawsuit points out.
Source
RSS