Two founders of the exchange The Rock Trading under arrest

Andrea Medri and Davide Barbieri, founders and former administrators of the crypto-asset exchange The Rock Trading, which went into judicial liquidation (the former bankruptcy) in April 2023 with a hole of almost EUR 66 million, are under arrest. The pre-trial detention order, signed by Milan's Gip Rossana Mongiardo, at the request of Deputy Prosecutor Roberto Pellicano and Prosecutors Pasquale Addesso and Grazia Colacicco, was carried out by the soldiers of the Special Currency Police Unit and the Milan Economic and Financial Police Unit of the Gdf, who were in charge of the complex investigation into an affair involving 18 thousand people.

Four main offences were alleged against the suspects: fraudulent bankruptcy, false corporate communications, fictitious formation of share capital and infidelity of assets. Until the crash, The Rock Trading, was one of Italy's most trusted cryptocurrency traders (32 types of cryptocurrency circulated on its wallets, from Bitcoin to Ethereum). Since the end of November 2022, however, the operators had been experiencing progressive payment delays that were becoming more and more pronounced.

This triggered a wave of withdrawal requests from users. Until February 2023 when, in order to stem the haemorrhaging, the organisers ordered a halt to operations, which only later became definitive and which soon resulted in the submission of over 700 complaints to the Gdf by customers. The investigation then developed abroad with rogatory requests in the United States and Switzerland with two investigation orders in Lithuania and Ireland, which made it possible to reconstruct the availability of part of the money by the suspects.

Recently, the request for judicial assistance in the US was supplemented and forwarded to Washington via the Ministry of Justice, leading to the seizure of cryptocurrencies on USB sticks worth EUR 500,000. In the course of the investigation, investigators recovered some chat conversations on the company's Slack platform (which the suspects were convinced they had destroyed) in which it was possible to read phrases such as: 'watch out that even there we are now well below ... my 70 are now lost and there are users with many bitcoins in their bodies, that if they withdraw ...'. From other conversations, then, it could be deduced that the collapse dates back to earlier years, when the company was based in Malta: 'These are old losses from the golden days,' Medri wrote in 2020. A scenario in which, then, there were 'operations' carried out using 'funds pertaining to other clients'.