That's part of the investigation.
Users funds are considered as exchange funds, and exchange funds are considered as executive/Sr. member's money. And the halt is requested by the authorities so there's no way anyone on the exchange team can do about it, much more their users.
They are centralized, they have to comply with government policies and regulations, government can control the exchange, but the exchange have control over customers.
The authorities seem to know what they are doing. There's an investigation going on, yes, but the freezing of all of the users' funds is not the order of the authorities. The order to put a halt to all of the exchange's activities including deposits and withdrawals is not coming from the authorities. The cancelation of all unfilled orders and the forcible liquidation of all leveraged positions is not done in compliance with the investigating authorities' decision. They're all decisions of Hotbit.
The authorities only ordered a freeze to
some of the exchange's suspicious funds. Furthermore, they're only inviting a number of senior managers for assistance. They didn't issue a blanket order.
And what now if a
former employee is under investigation? Does that justify the freezing of all users' funds? I don't think so. A former Coinbase employee was also investigated for possible criminal violations, Coinbase didn't freeze all of its users' funds. Coinbase's CEO itself was also under investigation, Coinbase didn't halt all of its services. The same goes with Binance, BitMEX, and other exchanges that are also investigated for various violations. But they didn't stop operating.
Which led me to think that NeuroticFish's suspicion is right.
I have a feeling that this is just a cover. I have a feeling they may be using the problems (if real) related to the former employee in order to do this or that, probably because their funds were not looking as good as they should.
If a single employee being accused of insider trading or some other financial crime is enough to result in an exchange having a majority of their assets frozen and therefore forcing them to suspend all activities for their users, then every customer of every exchange is taking an even bigger risk than previously thought by leaving any coins on those platforms. Not only do you have all the usual risks of scams, thefts, hacks, insolvency, etc, etc., but now you also have to trust every single one of their employees not to do something risky or stupid which could end up in your funds being inaccessible.
Exactly! This is such a terrifying precedent if that's the case.