A $7.2 million mistake was made by Crypto.com. A Lesson for Every Leader

An Australian woman and a few of her relatives are being sued by cryptocurrency giant Crypto.com for around $7.2 million that was unintentionally put in her account more than a year ago. Crypto.com is battling to collect the monies that have been dispersed among several persons in various countries months after the event, in what seems more like the storyline of a movie than a real-life incident.

It would be an understatement to say that Crypto.com is a victim of its own mistakes; very seldom has a firm of any magnitude shot itself in the foot with such precision. Every business leader may learn several things from this. Here are some examples of the mistakes made by Crypto.com.

1. Someone made a typo that started it all.

Crypto.com owes Thevamanogari Manivel a return of 100 Australian dollars (AUD), or around $68 back in May 2021. Press sources claim that a Crypto.com employee accidentally typed an account number into a box meant to hold the return amount. As a consequence, Manivel received a deposit from Crypto.com of about 10.5 million AUD, or almost $7.2 million.

You won’t believe it, but of all the errors in this weird narrative, this one is the tiniest and clearest. People become distracted, especially while performing repeated tasks. Typos occur.

2. Nobody noticed for seven months.

The greater issue is that it wasn’t until December 2021 that Crypto.com realized something was wrong during a normal audit. Would it take you seven months to realize $7.2 million had inexplicably vanished from the bank accounts of your business?

Beyond its court papers, Crypto.com has not provided an explanation for how it missed the missing millions or made any other public statements. (A corporate spokeswoman informed Inc. that since the litigation is still pending, the firm is unable to comment.) Whatever the cause, it is obvious that someone failed to pay attention when they ought to have.

Manivel had plenty of time during those seven months to decide she wanted to keep the money and to figure out how to go about doing so. According to the verdict made public last week, she transferred 430 000 AUD to her daughter’s account and spent 1.35 m AUD on a house in a Melbourne suburb. Then she gave her Malaysia-based sister ownership of the property. Manivel’s bank accounts have been ordered to be frozen by Australian courts. The sister has been told to sell the property and cover the charges and interest. However, it’s uncertain how everything will turn up considering the several jurisdictions involved and the difficulties in delivering legal notice to the sister thus far.

3. Crypto.com is laying off employees. It refuses to say how many.

We don’t know why someone neglected to monitor the accounts at Crypto.com. But one explanation may be that whoever it was recently lost their job or was preoccupied with trying to find out how many of their coworkers had.

In a series of tweets published in June, co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek announced that 260 employees, or 5% of the company’s staff, would be let go. However, considering what he was revealing, his tweets seemed weirdly cocky.

There could have been more involved. A few months later, The Verge revealed that Crypto.com had really let go of a lot more than 260 workers. Nobody, not even the employees who are still employed there, is aware of how many since the firm is keeping it a secret. According to The Verge, Marszalek was asked how many staff had been let go at an internal town hall this month. He replied that he had no duty to respond to the query. He declared, “A figure makes for a wonderful headline, and it’s a nice thing to rumor about.” But as co-owners of this firm, you should consider if having this number public is in your best interests, he concluded.

Employees have discovered that several of their former coworkers have quietly disappeared, are no longer attending meetings, and have had their email accounts deleted. An anonymous reviewer on Glassdoor said that the corporation was concealing the fact that it had really let go more than 1,000 workers, or around 19% of its workforce. The reviewer stated, “They deleted the company directory so we can’t observe the numbers go down.

4. Crypto.com seems to think it can control its own image.

Less than a year after investing $700 million to rename the Los Angeles Staples Center and hundreds of millions more on its “Fortune favors the brave” campaign with Matt Damon and its Super Bowl ad with LeBron James, Crypto.com is laying off employees.

Declaring that “Fortune favors the bold” is one thing. Spending more than $1 billion to increase your company’s visibility as “crypto winter” is about to set in is something quite else.

A excellent method to get people to notice your business is to create advertisements that include well-known figures. But if you draw attention, you should be aware that you also draw scrutiny and maybe uncomfortable inquiries. For instance, “How many employees are you laying off?” How many of them would still be employed if you hadn’t spent all that money on a stadium name and celebrity endorsements for your advertisements?

When asked about the layoffs, particularly in light of the company’s significant marketing expenditures, a Crypto.com spokesperson gave Inc. the following statement: “Since June, when we announced layoffs, we’ve optimized our staff to reflect the present external economic difficulties.

5. It takes more than flashy ads to build a successful company.

It’s difficult to guess what Marszalek is thinking or what drives Crypto.com’s decisions. But from the outside, everything appears to be the inflated ego of the entrepreneur. It’s entertaining to have Matt Damon represent your business. It takes a lot of time to check through your accounts to make sure $7.2 million hasn’t vanished. But in order to succeed in tough economic circumstances, a corporation needs to put in that type of tedious effort and pay attention to the basics.

Additionally, it requires more empathy than Marszalek appears to have shown. Any CEO would find it impossible to expect his staff to produce quality work while they speculate about who of their buddies had lost their jobs. The $7.2 million error seems almost expected given the pressure these employees must undoubtedly be under.

Crypto.com’s unintentional gift of $7.2 million to Manivel may or may not be recovered. The $1 billion it spent branding the Crypto.com Arena and creating celebrity-studded advertisements is unquestionably non-refundable. However, covert layoffs are the kind of thing that can erode workers’ faith in a firm and its management. The largest loss of all would occur if Crypto.com lost that faith.