In a court hearing over Crypto.com erroneously sending an Australian woman $10.5M, an executive says a worker in Bulgaria entered the wrong data on Excel
Money from crypto exchange was allegedly used to buy four houses worth $4m, vehicles, art and furniture, police officer tells court
Context & Ripple Effects
Crypto.com sued the Australian woman in August over the AU$10.5M sent in May 2021 when she requested a AU$100 refund; this hearing is where the exchange finally explains how it happened — a worker in Bulgaria entering wrong data into an Excel file. A police officer told the court the money was allegedly converted into four houses worth $4m, vehicles, art and furniture, which is why recovery now runs through asset tracing rather than a simple clawback.
First-order effects
- The hearing shifts the dispute from 'who received the money' to 'how a manual spreadsheet step could move eight figures without controls', putting Crypto.com's internal payment-approval process under court scrutiny.
- The woman's alleged purchases — four houses, vehicles, art, furniture — mean Crypto.com must pursue recovered assets through seizure and sale, not just account reversal.
Second-order effects
- The Excel explanation lands weeks before CEO Kris Marszalek admitted a far larger slip — 320K ETH (~$416M) meant for cold storage sent to Gate.io, later returned — compounding the picture of an exchange whose treasury and payout operations repeatedly failed at basic reconciliation ($416M Gate.io transfer).
- It follows January's disclosure that a breach hit 483 users for ~$33.84M in unauthorized withdrawals, giving counterparties and customers a three-incident track record to weigh against the platform (January breach affecting 483 users).
Third-order effects
- If courts keep treating exchange errors as recoverable through litigation and asset tracing — as the UK court did when it ordered Binance, Coinbase, Kraken and Luno to hand over customer details to hunt $10.7M in stolen funds (UK court order compelling exchanges to share customer data) — inter-exchange cooperation becomes a de facto recovery mechanism rather than an optional courtesy.
- Repeated human-error losses at major exchanges strengthen the case for regulators to mandate segregation, dual-control, and auditability of customer-fund movements rather than relying on post-hoc lawsuits.
The trend: Crypto exchanges' operational errors are migrating from private embarrassment to public legal record, with courts and cross-exchange data sharing becoming the standard recovery path.