How profitable is a basic investment in the fields of crypto? It turns out that a lot, especially if the platform you invested through errs in your favor. Two Australian sisters from the city of Melbourne enjoyed so much trouble in their favor last year that they managed to purchase a luxury mansion for more than a million dollars.
The two invested a base amount of 100 US dollars in the cryptocurrency trading platform Crypto.com and in May 2021 the account holder among the sisters, Tevmanogri Manival, submitted a request on the website to realize the profits and was supposed to receive her initial investment, 100 dollars, back into the bank account. When Manival accessed the account, she discovered that the amount transferred was no less than 10.5 million dollars.
Instead of contacting the company and alerting them to the problem, Manival wasted no time and immediately after receiving the funds, she opened a joint account for her sister Thilagbanti Gangdori and Lela, and transferred $10.1 million to it. In February of this year, Manival decided to be a particularly good sister and buy Gangdori a luxury house in the amount of 1.35 million dollars as a gift.
Crypto.com discovered the very expensive mistake during an IRS audit in December of last year and embarked on a legal battle to get its money back. Now the Australian news network 7News is reporting that following an appeal by the crypto trading company to the Australian Supreme Court, the sisters are required to sell the property and transfer the amount received to the company.
The company Crypto.com provides a platform for trading in digital currencies and is considered one of the largest in the world in the field. As of 2022, 50 million customers are registered on the site and the company employs 4,000 people. The platform has its own official digital currency called Cronos. The company is based in Singapore and was established in 2016 by the founders Bobby Bow, Gary Orr, Chris Marzalek and Raphael Mello. Last June, the company laid off about 5% of its employees due to the sharp declines in crypto that month and there are reports that the reductions in personnel continued throughout August.
According to the ruling of the Australian Supreme Court, “in a very unusual way, the plaintiffs did not notice the significant error and only found out about it a few months after the realization.” How does a ten million dollar error happen? According to Crypto.com, one of the employees who was responsible for the company’s money transfers entered the wrong account number in the redemption request and simply sent the money.
Legal experts and lawyers in Australia criticized the nurses on the grounds that there is a legal obligation to report unusual money transfers to the private bank account, especially when the account holder recognizes that a mistake has occurred. “There is no doubt that if you saw something in your account that you know shouldn’t be there, the duty and responsibility to inform the sender of the money is on you,” attorney Justin Lawrence from the Henderson & Ball firm told 7News, “if you are hiding someone else’s property, You are hiding property through actual fraud. You are not entitled to this capital and you must return it.”
Crypto.com’s legal proceedings against the sisters will resume in October of this year.