Altcoin News: The Organizers of the $3 Billion PlusToken Crypto Pyramid Scam Are Still at Large
August 19, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
About $3 billion is considered stolen by one of the largest exit scams in the history of cryptocurrencies, however, the main suspects are still at large and can transfer the assigned funds, writes The Block, citing analytic firm CipherTrace and Chinese police.
PlusToken, a provider of custodial and exchange services, supposedly totaled about 4 million users. CipherTrace estimates investor deposits at $2.9 billion, but the actual amount may be different since the exact number of PlusToken addresses is unknown. Chinese law enforcement agencies are also investigating.
Six PlusToken members were arrested, confirmed at the Yancheng City Public Security Bureau. In June, the South China Morning Post reported that six Chinese citizens were detained in Vanuatu for organizing online fraud. The name of the fraudulent scheme was not specified in the publication, but soon the network was flooded with rumors that detainees could be associated with PlusToken.
Last week, Yancheng’s prosecutor’s office confirmed the investigation into the activities of six individuals allegedly involved in the financial pyramid. Yancheng Public Security Bureau said the police are still looking for the main operators of the fraudulent scheme.
While the investigation is ongoing, attackers continue to transfer the assigned funds between wallets, says CipherTrace. So, on August 13, 15,000 BTC were transferred from one alleged PlusToken wallet to another, and later another 22,922 BTC.
A number of market participants associated these transactions with the depreciation of Bitcoin that occurred this week. At the same time, TokenAnalyst claims that it could not find any evidence of PlusToken getting Bitcoin to cryptocurrency exchanges.
This, however, is not the first such incident in China. Amid the spread of financial services on the Internet, citizens are increasingly becoming victims of fraudsters. The organizers of one of these schemes deceived over 220,000 people who were invited to participate in the peer-to-peer lending program and appropriated about $16 billion. Currently, there are several projects in their structure resembling PlusToken, including Cloud Token, S Block and V- Dimension (VDS).
PlusToken was launched in early 2018, and by September was suspected of organizing a financial pyramid. This June, the company panicked Chinese and Korean investors when some users began reporting that they could not withdraw assets from their wallets. Later, the problems were attributed to a hacker attack, and on August 5, the platform posted messages that it would soon begin to process requests for withdrawal of funds.
Author: Marko Vidrih
