Golix CEO Lost Password To Wallet Containing Close To $250 000 Worth Of BTC Last Year

Earlier this morning we ran a story on the latest update on whether or not Golix had actually managed to give their customers what they owed them. Since breaking that story a number of sources who preferred to remain anonymous reached out to us allowing us to get the bigger picture and details the CEO wouldn’t acknowledge.

One of the sources a client who was owed around $40 000 – in both RTGS and coins- explained the sequence of events as follows:

The client got an acknowledgement of debt which was signed by Tawanda Kembo himself.
The CEO of Golix also proposed a payment plan which would ensure payment after 3 months.
After the 3 months had passed the client claims they never heard back from the CEO of Golix

The lost password…

Our anonymous source also explained why customers were failing to withdraw cryptos and unfortunately it’s due to what appears to be a rookie mistake by the CEO.

The source claims Tawanda Kembo told him that he had lost the password to the cold wallet which contained 33 Bitcoin – something we believe is true as it was disclosed to us earlier by a different source (at the time we had no way of verifying how true it was). The source didn’t share when this password was lost but in May 2018 when the Golix fiasco started one Bitcoin was around $7 487 (according to Statista) which means if the password was lost during this period, close to $250 000 was actually lost due to this mistake.

For those who aren’t familiar with how cold storage works here is a pretty good explainer from Investopedia:

Cold storage is an offline wallet provided for storing bitcoins. With cold storage, the digital wallet is stored on a platform that is not connected to the internet, thereby, protecting the wallet from unauthorized access, cyber hacks, and other vulnerabilities that a system connected to the internet is susceptible to.
Investopedia

Whilst the cold wallet is great for security, it comes with high risks since the loss of a password will render all the bitcoin on it inaccessible.

At the time of writing, Mr Kembo’s phone is still redirecting to voicemail and he hasn’t replied to any request for comment via email.