Canadian Crypto Platform Found Guilty of Gambling With Users’ Funds as Founder Faces Prison

The Canadian cryptocurrency trading platform ezBtc and its founder, David Smillie, have been found guilty of defrauding customers by misappropriating approximately 13 million Canadian dollars ($9.5 million) of their cryptocurrency investments, using the funds for personal gambling activities. A panel established by the British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC), a provincial regulator in Canada, concluded that ezBtc had misused customer funds “for their own purposes.” The platform, which ceased operations permanently around September 2019 and was dissolved in 2022, had claimed that all user crypto investments were securely stored in cold storage. During its operation between 2016 and 2019, ezBtc collected