SatoWallet has revealed details of the challenges facing the exchange platform. The details were made known by the CEO of Satowallet, Samuel Benedict.
According the “report” published on Medium, the CEO gave revealing account of the journey so far. SatoWallet gained global attention immediately it was founded in May, 2017 due to the commitment of the team in improving the project by adding new features.
Satowallet revealed that exchange community grew so large and thus Customer Support became a great priority as users had to be satisfied at all times.
In the mid of 2018, the exchange decided to transit from a mobile wallet to a mobile exchange allow users to exchange crypto assets with their mobile phones. This was available in iOS, Android and PC devices.
This upgrade according the Satowallet necessitated the increase of the staff capacity to a quarter of a 100. While there had been cyber attacks on the platform, these were not successful as the security of the platform was continually worked upon.
A year after the transition from mobile wallet to mobile exchange, Satowallet had another major development achievement. Based on users’ feedback, it decided to have a web exchange platform which was to be connected to the mobile App already in the market.
During the period of the upgrade, scammers impersonated Administrators of the exchange of Telegram and were able to collect user login details. This was used to drain the account of users when the platform went live. Though the stolen fund was refunded by Satowallet, this resulted in the enforcement of KYC as an extra security measure for securing users accounts.
“This has done so much damage to my company, satowallet and her users and my personal life and finance.” – Samuel Benedict, CEO, SatoWallet.
The institution of KYC created a stable system for months according to the Report and then, seeing the stability of the system, the KYC policy was reviewed and removed allowing users to transact easily. The removal brought again another wave of scammers tricking users to provide their login details and 2FA and withdrawing their funds.
The scammers’ activities made Satowallet to make withdrawals from the platform manual but this was met with complaints from users of the platform.
In August, 2019, CEO, Samuel Benedict said he woke up to several messages from users saying they couldn’t access the platform. This was confirmed when the developer team discovered that 9 servers (for wallet nodes, app and web) were down.
“That server is no more”
The data center OVH.com which houses the dedicated server that cost $6500 monthly and SatoWallet has been using for about 2 years was reached out to. That was the beginning of the challenges which SatoWallet is currently facing.
Satowallet reached out to OVH.com to get to know what was happening but until a days was something done to get the platform online. The platform came back online but some database data was lost.
Refusing to give up, Samuel Benedict continued saying Satowallet started installing the wallet nodes of all crypto assets on the platform through the “wallet.dat” backups so the platform can get up running.
Once the installation was complete, Satowallet noticed that the cryptoassets on the platform were no longer there from the backups and private keys, this was when it contacted the OVH.com again hoping to get access to the main servers.
Satowallet revealed it also accused OVH.com of fraud and trying to steal the server containing the wallet servers.
OVH.com replied via a representative as seen on a Skype chat screenshot presented by Samuel Benedict that the server is no more due to accusation and they will publish post.
OVH.com stopped reply messages to give further explanations and this was when the exchange attorneys were contacted on the best approach to the issue. But all details of their location have been removed from their website, Satowallet said.
Describing the issue as the most traumatic experience in his life, CEO, Samuel Benedict said they tried to contact several investors to see if they could remedy the situation but there was no positive response. Adding to issue on ground, the CEO said upon getting to the office few days later, 70% of its workers had tendered their resignation expressing fear their salaries might not be paid based on the challenges on ground.
Sam Benedict said “it’s hard for me to even believe what happened,” and for the next step forward, he said “therefore I decided to seek merger while our lawyers are working to track down OVH team as they were not responding on any social media or contact.”
On the 23rd of September, 2019, Satowallet revealed that OVH.com disabled the new web and app server after the accusation of fraud by the exchange platform. Similar complaints was also found upon checking the Facebook page of OVH.com
Ending the “detailed report”, SatoWallet called everyone to join hands to help in tracking OVH.com and seeing the saga come to an end. He commented saying “this has done so much damage to my company, satowallet and her users and my personal life and finance.”
Samuel Benedict continued saying
“I am totally open to every positive contact as I still do not believe our funds are lost. I will never scam anyone of $1; if I wanted to do that then i would not have made my personality public from day one running my company for 8 years now.”
I see no reasons why I would want to scam, Samuel Benedict concluded.
OVH is a French cloud computing company that offers VPS, dedicated servers and other web services. The company was founded in 1999 by the Klaba family and is headquartered in Roubaix, France. OVH is incorporated as a simplified joint-stock company under French law.
