Dear Instawallet users,
I am a co-founder of Paymium, the company behind Instawallet.
We have now finished our analysis of the events that lead to the suspension of the service.
An intruder was able to access the instawallet database. As a result, all "hidden" urls, i.e wallets, have been compromised and are no longer safe to store bitcoins.
Funds were stolen: a police report was filed by Paymium with BEFTI ( Brigade d’Enquêtes sur les Fraudes aux Technologies de l’Information, a unit of the French "Police Judiciaire") and an investigation is in progress.
Computer forensic analysis is in progress with independent auditors.
We will be able to refund all instawallet balances up to 50 BTC per wallet.
In the next few days we are going to open the claim process for Instawallet balance holders to claim the funds they had stored before the service interruption.
Important information on claims submission:
1. For the first 90 days we will accept claims for individual Instawallets. Your wallet's URL and key will be used to pre-populate a form to file the claim.
2. After 90 days, if no other claim has been received for the same url, your Instawallet balance under 50 BTC will be refunded.
If several claims have been filed for the same url, we will process those claims on a case by case basis, under the presumption that the claim we received first belongs to the legitimate balance holder.
3. Claims for wallets that hold a balance greater than 50 BTC will be processed on a case by case and best efforts basis.
The number of such wallets represents less than 0.5% of the number of funded wallets in our records.
In other words, 99.5% of instawallets will be fully refunded.
If you file a claim with Paymium, please do not contact us regarding your claim until the 90-day period has elapsed.
We will need to wait the end of the period to send the refunds as some people might have forgotten about their instawallet and need time to retrieve it.
Thanks for your patience and understanding.
EDIT:
The reason some of you have not seen their payout is simply that they did not approve the proposed payout.
We need discharge from the people we pay out otherwise there is no way to remove the liability from our books.
The discharge is required also because the database might have been tampered with: even though it may be minimal and partial, there is a non zero probability that the proposed amount does not match the expected amount.
Payouts may be approved until the end of the year. Unapproved payouts will be considered as donations after the end of the year.
A sendmany transaction will be sent in January 2014 to those who filed a claim on time but failed to approve their payout so far.
To approve a payout, simply visit your wallet page (do not forget to type https://www.instawallet.org/w/yourwalletsecreturl in full). Thanks for your cooperation in getting these claims resolved.
