Banco Bradesco was sentenced in September last year by the State Court of Rio de Janeiro to return more than BRL 500,000 from a cryptocurrency brokerage, which alleges that ten TEDs (withdrawals) were made from its account at the financial institution without authorization.
To ensure that the measure is complied with, in March this year the Court determined the attachment of more than R$ 1 million from the institution. The decision is still subject to appeal.
The brokerage that filed the lawsuit against Bradesco is Comprar Bitcoin, a whitelabel from Bleutrade. Whitelabel is the term used when a company’s product or service only earns a label to be marketed. Bleutrade is a cryptocurrency exchange, from which Comprar Bitcoin used the system to make operations in Brazil.
Comprar Bitcoin claims that BRL 580,000 from one of its Bradesco accounts was transferred without authorization. Judge Andrea Gonçalves Duarte Joanes, from the 7th Civil Court of Niterói (RJ), accepted the exchange’s request and ordered the bank to return the money, also establishing the attachment, according to data from Process 0049501-14.2020.8.19.0002 TJ -RJ
The magistrate said in the decision that the bank did not present any evidence demonstrating that the transfers were made by people who had access to the passwords.
“In addition to not stating, in particular, that the operations contested by the plaintiff [corretora] have actually been carried out by it, the defendant [banco] also did not bring to the deed any element that points in that direction. There is no evidence that the plaintiff, through her representative, actually carried out the transfers. There is no alternative to considering the facts on which the claim is based as demonstrated”, says the judge.
Locked withdrawals
The case came to light in April this year, when the Compra Bitcoin brokerage blocked the withdrawal of more than BRL 187,000 from a customer who was also the exchange’s market maker.
Market makers are players responsible for providing liquidity to the market, operating arbitrage robots or other strategies in order to facilitate the operation of users at the brokerage.
In this case, the person involved in the imbroglio is programmer Leandro Trindade. On April 14, the market maker went to withdraw part of the money he obtained from transactions on the platform and was prevented.
Comprar Bitcoin claimed that it had no way to release the withdrawals, as it had more than BRL 500,000 transferred against its will.
The CEO of Compra Bitcoin, Yago Carvalho, says he does not know if there was a failure or any fraud in the process and that, for the time being, the bank has not yet returned the money to the programmer – the case has not yet become final, that is, appeals are still available. .
“Banco Bradesco made several TEDs from our bank account, without any authorization from our company. The money was withdrawn from our account arbitrarily and without any explanation (to date, Bradesco has not provided any justification for the reason for the withdrawal of amounts from our account). We cannot say whether a crime is taking place within Banco Bradesco, what we can say through all the evidence in the process is that there was an absurd error on the part of the Bank in making TEDs from our account without authorization”, said Carvalho.
In response to the Bitcoin Portal, Bradesco limited itself to saying that “the bank does not comment on sub judice cases”.
“They used new investors to pay the old ones”
At the other end of the legal battle is the broker’s client, Leandro Trindade, who sees a considerable amount of his equity held up due to the dispute between the broker and the bank.
Even with the court decision, favorable to Compra Bitcoin, he says he does not exempt the brokerage. “This story with Bradesco happened after I joined Comprar Bitcoin. In other words, they were already using new investors to pay the old ones”, he says.
Asked if he believes in the existence of a pyramid scheme in the company, he says that “I cannot accuse. But if that was the problem, they were insolvent for some time”.
Trindade claims that the Buy Bitcoin market has “dead” and that the exchange has taken all robot sell orders “probably” to prevent panic-driven trading from occurring. “This is good, because it also prevents people from depositing money there to buy, and ending up with a blocked balance as well”, she concludes.
