Investors claim crypto lender Nexo blocked their withdrawals

A family of investing entrepreneurs are suing Nexo for preventing them from withdrawing their funds and claim they were intimidated into selling crypto assets back to the lender at a 60% discount.

Many centralised crypto lenders are feeling the pinch right now. If they aren’t in bankruptcy then they are very likely struggling with the lack of liquidity which is something the entire crypto space is suffering from.

Nexo’s case is slightly different, given that hitherto the crypto lender has not received any allegations of insolvency. However, the way it has interacted with some of its investors does leave it open to some suspicion on this account.

City A.M. covered a story earlier today of two brothers and their cousin who filed a lawsuit against Nexo, claiming that it had blocked their access to withdrawing the value of more than $126 million in cryptocurrencies, and that they had been intimidated into selling discounted $NEXO tokens worth millions back to the crypto lender under the threat of not being able to withdraw.

The Mortons are a family of fintech entrepreneurs who originally began to have concerns over their investments in Nexo back in 2020. The concerns included Nexo’s status with the FCA, the UK regulatory watchdog, along with the amount of $NEXO tokens owned by employees of the company.

The Mortons shared their concerns with Nexo in December 2020, but felt that they hadn’t received a satisfactory response, and so started to sell their $NEXO tokens in amounts that they hoped wouldn’t affect the token price. 

However, in March of 2021 Nexo imposed a withdrawal limit of $150,000 a day, and then went a step further the following day by greying out the withdrawal buttons on their apps, which prevented them from withdrawing any of their cryptocurrency at all from the platform. In addition, the two Morton brothers had their convert button greyed out, thereby preventing them from converting any of their cryptocurrencies.

At this point the Mortons contacted Nexo and were told by an account manager that the blocks were applied to their account in order to “support the price of Nexo tokens.” The manager then offered a deal to unblock withdrawals if the Mortons would sell their $NEXO tokens back to the company for a 60% discount.

The Mortons accepted the deal and were then able to remove nearly $39 million in Tether stable coins. However, had they been able to remove their $NEXO tokens at the time they originally wanted to, then they would have been worth around $84.5 million.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.