Thailand Files Criminal Complaint Against Its Largest Crypto Exchange Over a Hidden 2021 Hack

Thailand’s securities regulator has filed a criminal complaint against the country’s largest crypto exchange and two of its former executives. The allegation: a cyberattack was covered up for months, and the paperwork filed with regulators said nothing had happened at all.

May 2021

Attackers hit the exchange and made off with digital assets across 16 different tokens, worth an estimated 1.7 billion baht — somewhere in the range of $47 to $50 million depending on which prices are used. This part of the story isn’t in dispute.

May Through October 2021

According to the regulator, this is where things went wrong. The exchange’s daily net-capital filings during this period showed no significant change in assets, even though a nine-figure sum in baht had just been stolen. Two former directors are separately accused of knowingly entering false information into those filings, allegedly to convince the regulator that customer funds remained fully intact and no loss had occurred.

The Cover Story

The exchange’s defense, as it has been reported, is not that the hack didn’t happen — it’s that non-disclosure was a deliberate choice to prevent a bank run. The company’s founders say they personally covered the loss by purchasing replacement digital assets equal to what was stolen, meaning no customer ultimately lost money. Whether that justifies months of false regulatory filings is now a question for Thailand’s courts rather than the company’s PR team.

Now

The case has been referred to Thailand’s Economic Crime Suppression Division, which means a police investigation comes before any formal prosecution — a process that in comparable cases elsewhere has taken months to years. The exchange remains the largest in its home market, still reporting daily trading volume above $500 million while the case proceeds.

The bigger question hanging over this case isn’t really about one exchange. It’s about whether “we’ll fix it quietly so nobody panics” is an acceptable substitute for “we’ll tell our regulator the truth” — and Thai authorities have just signaled, with a criminal complaint against the market leader rather than a smaller platform, that their answer is no.

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