The plaintiff in a lawsuit charging BitMEX with market manipulation and operating without a license in the United States believes that Twilio has thousands of incriminating e-mail records to prove its case.
The Bitcoin Manipulation Abatement LLC (BMA) has asked the court to preserve all BitMEX-related email data held by Twilio, the U.S. cloud communications platform. The BMA is concerned that without the order, BitMEX could delete all the records.
The BMA filed a lawsuit in mid-May accusing BitMEX’s parent company, HDR Global Trading Ltd., of widespread manipulation of the crypt market and of being an unlicensed money transmission business in the U.S.
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BMA wants BitMEX e-mails to be preserved
In an archive released on June 9, the Iq Option estimated that Twilio has approximately 30,000 email records related to BitMEX transactions.
BMA General Counsel Pavel Pogodin told Law 360 that „BitMEX uses Twilio to communicate with all of its users on a daily basis.
„Therefore, according to BitMEX itself, Twilio stores a database of all the e-mail addresses of BitMEX users,“ Pogodin said. „It was a mistake for them to use the American company for this purpose and at the same time claim the lack of personal jurisdiction of the U.S. and California courts.
The Bitcoin Manipulation Abatement describes HDR Global Trading as a shell company based in the Seychelles that was created to claim that BitMEX is not subject to U.S. law.
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The BMA file states that when they requested information on the operation of the company, they were sent a meme that had „incorporated in the Seychelles, come to me, brother“ written on a picture of one of the founders of BitMEX.
According to the BMA, the subtext of the „cynical“ response indicated confidence that BitMEX could avoid U.S. jurisdiction through its Seychelles-based parent company.
BitMEX is accused of operating without a licence in the USA.
The file states that the BMA seeks to „preserve a snapshot of information, including the email address details of specific users, which is evidence of the defendants‘ contacts with the forum and evidence that the defendants are running an unlicensed money transmission business in the United States“.
The BMA claims that Twilio had placed a „temporary suspension of the removal of the BitMEX account“ until June 15, while it evaluated the plaintiff’s preservation request, after which BitMEX will be able to remove all U.S. email data stored on Twilio.
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In response to requests for data preservation guarantees, the BMA states that Twilio „refused to acknowledge the defendants‘ duty to preserve the content of the users‘ e-mail database“ and responded evasively.
The BMA’s complaint alleges money laundering, wire fraud and violation of money transmission, claiming that BitMEX „was deliberately designed from scratch for the purpose of engaging in, facilitating, aiding, abetting, counselling, inducing and/or procuring a myriad of illegal activities.
