Tether critic's Twitter account suspended under questionable circumstances

Why release an audit of your so-called stablecoin when you can just shut down your loudest critic's Twitter account?

The cryptocurrency world has been in a uproar with allegations that stablecoin Tether and exchange Bitfinex have artificially propped up the value of Bitcoin and are running an elaborate scam. One prominent voice making that claim could, until sometime early Feb. 7, be found on Twitter at @Bitfinexed. That changed for several hours today when the account was briefly suspended by Twitter.

The person behind Bitfinexed says the exchange Bitfinex is to blame.

"After failing to spam my Twitter with 400,000 fake followers, Bitfinex hires bots to mass-report my tweets and accounts," posted Bitfinexed to the Buttcoin subreddit. "My Twitter account is currently suspended, earlier I had about 20 tweets that were considered 'private' despite the fact that it's all public information (and some stuff that even the NY times has along with bloomberg, yeah so private), so they've been using bots to mass report my tweets."

Bitfinexed has been a persistent thorn in the side of both Bitfinex and Tether, repeatedly pointing to the latter's failure to release an updated audit to prove its stablecoin token known as USDT is in fact backed one-to-one by U.S. dollar reserves as the company claims.

There are currently around 2.25 billion USDTs in existence, so you can see why this is such a big deal.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

We reached out to Bitfinex for comment, and will update this when we hear back. According to a Twitter spokesperson, the account suspension was a mistake — however no additional details were provided as to what brought that mistake about.

The person behind Bitfinexed, on the other hand, says they know exactly what's going on.

"Basically, they've been reporting every single one of my tweets saying it has 'private' information, when in fact everything has been pulled from public sources and information that was voluntarily shared (and put online) by the senders," Bitfinexed explained to Mashable over email. "One of the tweets that was flagged contained the attached graphic. [It's] an old email the sender shared publicly trying to expose [Bitfinex] fraud."

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Bitfinexed is just posting publicly available information and connecting the dots in the process, they continued.

"Nothing is private in what I have exposed," noted Bitfinexed. "Even the banking details are always published online and anyone that uses [Bitfinex] can see these details. None of it is private or secret.

"They keep cycling through random bank accounts, [Polish] bank, got closed, went to [Netherlands] bank, that one got closed, now they have another bank... all different account holders and they are all shell companies for [Bitfinex]."

In the eyes of Bitfinexed, it all comes down to this: "They are doing wide scale money laundering and I've been exposing it."

So you can see why Bitfinex might be pissed. But does that mean the exchange is responsible for the temporary suspension of Bitfinexed's Twitter account? That much remains unconfirmed, and will likely stay that way unless Twitter provides some insight.

In the meantime, those looking to read up on alleged shady practices that may or may not be going down at Tether and Bitfinex need only look to some other Twitter accounts — like those belonging to Bloomberg, or this publication right here.

This story has been updated to note that Bitfinexed's Twitter account was restored Wednesday afternoon, and to include comment from Twitter about the cause of the suspension.