This is crazy. How can an exchange exist without anybody knowing where it is? Wouldn't credit card payments or bank transfers create a money trail? Has nobody decided to do detective work to figure this out? I never knew this was possible to create a website and be able to anonymously collect money without a trail. I remember somebody recommending Hitbtc has a secure exchange. I don't remember ever hearing anything bad about it, but now it seems everywhere.
Yeah, all of that shit's crazy, isn't it? But for better or worse I think we're nearing the end of these wild west days of unregulated exchanges that nobody knows anything about (like Yobit for instance). And as far as people doing detective work, I don't think it happens all that often because crypto users generally don't want to take their cases to law enforcement and thereby draw attention to themselves--with the result that you get shitty exchanges like HitBTC getting away with murder.
By the way, the warning signs were there for HitBTC for quite a while. I'm pretty sure right now they're recognized as a bona fide scam exchange, and hopefully people are not using them anymore (though I suspect many will continue to).