Some BlockFi users woke up to a bitcoin windfall, after the company made a payment mistake. The company made the error while paying its clients who participated in a promotion. According to the company, BlockFi, the situation is under control and has contacted the affected clients.
Although BlockFi did not specify the number of affected users, it announced that they are less than 100. The company informed its users that there is no disruption of operation as a result of this development.
One of the terms of the promotion was that users would get a bonus in GUSD. However, some accounts received the payment in BTC, making them grossly overpaid. For instance, a user who was supposed to get 701. 4 GUSD, got 701.4 BTC instead. Despite the assurance of normal operations, the BlockFi Subreddit has many complaints from its users with issues ranging from failure for people to withdraw their cryptocurrencies to suspended accounts.
In order to recover the BTC, BlockFi purports that it reversed some transactions. On the other hand, some clients complained that they failed to receive their expected bonus in GUSD. Whereas, some clients accuse the company for including them under a group of people who wrongly received the said amounts.
Nonetheless, some users have admitted that they received large sums of BTC but they are not able to withdraw them. The confusion was compounded since the payments were labelled as bonus payments, which could be another reason that prompted some clients to withdraw the wrongly credited BTC.
Due to the confusion surrounding the issue some users converted their BTC into GUSD, fearing that the company might claim them as part of the wrongly disbursed amounts.
However, some users say that they are facing various challenges as a result of the incident. Some are failing to log into their accounts while others cannot make other transactions.
Thus from the look of it, BlockFi noticed the error in a very short time, thereby taking appropriate measures to reclaim part of the BTC. The sad thing, according to some clients, is the panic and confusion they experienced as a result of this.
BlockFi has currently used three measures to recover the coins. According to some users, as expressed on Reddit, the company has suspended some accounts, persuaded some customers to return the BTC as well as threatening legal action.
In general, some analysts believe that people can recover some BTC sent to wrong addresses by using a technological process called “partial key data” to recover the complete bitcoin key. However, this method works only with hard wallets which are corrupted.
If individuals can use this technology to recover some BTC, it is most likely that exchanges and established crypto organizations such as BlockFi have better technologies to do so.
