A pair of South African brothers have disappeared with Bitcoin worth $3.6 billion from their cryptocurrency investment platform Africrypt, according to a report by Bloomberg.
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A law firm based in Cape Town hired by affected investors states that they¡¯re unable to locate the scam brother duo and have reported about this to the nation¡¯s elite police force, the Hawks. The law firm has also notified cryptocurrency exchanges around the world to be on the lookout for any attempts to be made to convert digital coins.?
The disappearance of around 69,000 bitcoins came right after the massive surge in the value of the cryptocurrency, making this the biggest ever dollar loss in a cryptocurrency scam.?
Initial hints of the chaos that was going to surface came in April as Bitcoin was on its upward trajectory. At the same time, Africrypt¡¯s CEO, Ameer Cajee, the elder brother among the duo, announced that they had been victims of a cyberattack. Oddly enough, Cajee had requested the clients to not report this to lawyers as it would result in the slowing down of the recovery process.?
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While many agreed to what Cajee said, some were a bit unsettled and they got a law firm onboard and a separate group commenced liquidation proceedings against the investment platform.?
They said that Africrypt employees actually lost access to the backend platform nearly a week before the alleged attack took place. Investigation revealed that Africrypt had transferred funds from its South African accounts and client wallets through various mixers or larger pools of bitcoin, making it untraceable.?
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Soon after, calls to Cajee¡¯s phone started going unanswered. And soon after, Raees,, his brother who founded the investment platform with him, went off the grid too. Soon after, the Africrypt website was down.?
What¡¯s surprising is that even though South Africa¡¯s Finance Sector Conduct Authority is investigating what went wrong with Africrypt, they can¡¯t really launch a formal investigation. This is because cryptocurrency assets are not legally considered financial products in the nation as of now.?
South Africa saw another bitcoin trading platform -- Mirror Trading International -- vanish in thin air last year after it disappeared with 23,000 bitcoins amounting to $1.2 billion at the time, and was regarded as the biggest crypto scam of 2020.