In a filing reported by MegaloPreneur Magazine on September 20, Jieyi Chen, the director of JP-EX Crypto Asset Platform PTY LTD (JPEX), submitted an application for deregistration to the Australian Securities and Investment Commission. In the application, JPEX asserts that all company members have consented to the deregistration, the company has ceased its operations, its assets do not exceed $1,000 Australian dollars, and it has no outstanding liabilities.
On September 13, during the Token2049 conference in Singapore, the JPEX team reportedly abandoned its corporate booth following the arrest of six JPEX employees by Hong Kong police on charges of fraud related to the operation of an unlicensed crypto exchange. The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) also reported on the same day that it had received over 1,000 complaints regarding the JPEX platform, with claims of losses totaling over 1 billion Hong Kong dollars ($128 million).
As the scandal unfolded, JPEX purportedly raised its withdrawal fees to 999 USDT in an attempt to prevent users from transferring assets out of the exchange. Prior to this, JPEX had offered staking with yields as high as 30% per year on stablecoins.
At the time of publication, the JPEX website is inaccessible. Shortly before going offline, JPEX published a compensation plan for users, promising reimbursement on a “one-to-one” basis by converting their assets into a stake in the JPEX decentralized autonomous organization before September 21. The exchange also alleged that third-party custodians had “maliciously frozen” platform assets due to the SFC investigation, leading to an “unprecedented catastrophe.”
