If there’s a single case of an exchange using a customer’s assets to make bets isn’t that a fraud charge? Or with the unregulated nature of crypto is it not that explicit?
Dipping into customers funds for operating expenses or other uses (loans to associated parties, investment, leveraging) is a big no for an exchange, obviously, whether or not it is fraud is ultimately for a judge to determine but it sure looks like that to me.
The lure of those balances is invariably too great to resist.
Regulated exchanges are obviously a different branch entirely, but the rest of them have serious problems keeping their hands off the customer funds. And as was pointed out to me upthread even the regulated exchanges may not have enough of a wall between the crypto they hold for customers and their operating funds to guarantee that those customer funds are going to be there if the company fails.
Time and again we find that exchanges have been dipping in and using money that wasn't theirs in ways that would never fly in a regulated environment.
