Karma Group has filed a lawsuit process against HitBTC through the Hong Kong court and financial regulator. This major exchange received 527.01 ETH from Karma for the listing services, but has not fulfilled it’s obligations.
Today Karma lawyers started litigation with HitBTC, which is rated 7th among all the crypto exchanges. The following letter before action was sent to the official email addresses and official Hong Kong office address. HitBTC didn’t provided any updates on listing deadlines and haven’t refunded the 527.01 ETH until 29th of May
Background
It’s been 60 days since the 30th of March 2018, when Karma paid 527.01 Ether to the HitBTC Ethereum address from the official invoice #040–03–18 sent by Tim Novak (https://etherscan.io/tx/0x8570546ec7ffbf0f2c7ea41b893b0e2eb0b07ad9c9f3299ec10b84a136e59178)
There were 3 items which were requested by Karma in that service order:
Blockchain implementation.
Listing of two trading pairs (BTC and ETH) + Re-tweet
Additional trading pair (USDT).
At first, HitBTC representatives agreed to complete all the obligations until the April 20th, 2018. Karma provided HitBTC team with all the information about the BTS-based blockchain (non ERC-20). Plus, Karma team notified HitBTC once more on March 29th, 2018 that KRM is not an ERC-20 token.
Karma team have been regularly requesting HitBTC for the status updates during 01–20 April, and HitBTC representatives constantly reported, that the April 20th deadline would be completed. Karma team was constantly offering any technical help, but HitBTC rejected these proposals.
Then, when HitBTC have failed to deliver the work by April 20th, they’ve ceased all communication for 5 days, and then tried to tell Karma team that Karma hadn’t notified HitBTC developers about that KRM is not an ERC-20 token (which is false statement).
Since then HitBTC haven’t provided a new completion date, only vague estimates: “under 12 more than 5” or “should be 10 days”.
Karma team consider these actions made by HitBTC to be fraudulent.
Therefore, Karma lawyers are preparing to initiate legal action against HitBTC and report to the Hong Kong financial regulator.
“The Karma team stands for transparency and a high level of business ethics. The fathers of the crypto economy were standing for freedom, but 100% freedom always comes with 100% responsibility. We're sure that the basic principles violation, especially by the big market players, is unacceptable. That's why we decided to create this international law case.”
George Goognin, Karma Founder
Now Karma together with Hong Kong financial regulator is going to examine the legitimacy of that exchange. The case will be pursued until justice prevails.
HitBTC is a big cryptocurrency exchange from TOP-10.
Karma.red is a blockchain cross-border p2p-lending marketplace and currently traded on decentralized exchanges, OpenLedger and RuDEX. The platform is already working, and 3 companies have got the loans of about $500.000 USD in total volume.