What would you do if a company accidentally refunded you millions of dollars you never claimed?
Well, Gizmodo reported on Tuesday that Crypto.com, one of the biggest crypto platforms in the world, made an extremely expensive mistake.
When a woman from Melbourne, Australia asked the company for a refund, instead of AU$100, she got 100.000 times more.
Thevamanogari Manivel asked the company to process a refund of AUD 100 in May last year, but an employee transferred the whopping $10,5 million to her account.
This happened during a period of rapid expansion for Crypto.com, as the price of popular digital currencies such as bitcoin had hit a ceiling, and the exchange was promoting cryptocurrency-based credit and debit cards.
It took the company seven full months to realize it had made a mistake, initially only discovering the embezzled funds during an audit in December. The company filed suit in the Supreme Court of Victoria earlier this year and magistrates froze Manivel's bank account in February.
With such a windfall in her account, Manivel decided to transfer the $10,1 million to a joint account and then bought a $1,35 million five-bedroom house for her sister last February.
The Supreme Court of Victoria has already sided with Crypto.com, ordering Manivel to sell the mini-mansion and return those funds to the company. According to The Guardian, Crypto.com's lawyers were unable to contact Manivel's sister, Thilagavathy Gangadory, to serve her with orders to freeze her account. The court then entered a default judgment in favor of Crypto.com, ordering the sister to repay the money along with $27.369,64 in interest and costs.
The company probably needs that money back, now more than ever. Although 2021 was "their year", 2022 was difficult.
The exchange suffered a massive hack worth $34 million worth of cryptocurrency and the company said it would refund its users. Like many crypto exchanges, Crypto.com has been hit by the recent crypto market downturn.
The company announced in June that it was cutting 260 staff positions, or about 5% of its total workforce, although there were reports from anonymous employee interviews that the company was laying off hundreds more workers than it said publicly.
