When the price of Ethereum rocketed, I was soon sitting on a decent pile of money.

Then that decent pile of money disappeared.

I hadn't used my private key to access my account for some time and was getting the jitters when the price of all cryptocurrencies began to fall in 2018. Maybe it was time to take some out.

But when I tried to do so, I saw with horror that all of my Ethereum - about £25,000's worth - had already been taken out; the cupboard was bare.

It had been moved to another private key address and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. There seemed to be no-one to complain to.

A transaction on Ethereum cannot be reversed and there is no safety net - nothing like the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) that guarantees up to £85,000 on UK bank accounts.

After contacting people in my extensive crypto network, I found out that my Ether money had been taken to the Binance cryptocurrency exchange and, according to Binance, moved again within 60 minutes.

Trying to get information from Binance was a Kafkaesque nightmare - just an automated message saying it would respond within 72 hours when 72 seconds would have been more useful.