The owner of the South African cryptocurrency exchange “disappeared” with $ 3.6 billion in Bitcoin

After a cyber attack, together with two managers from AfriCrypt, a cryptocurrency exchange in South Africa, huge amounts of Bitcoin, valued at several billion dollars, disappeared. So is this really a cyber attack or a scam?

AfriCrypt was founded in 2019 and is run by the brothers Ameer and Raees Cajee. The company is said to have amassed a large amount of BTC valued at around 54 billion South African rand, or the equivalent of $ 3.6 billion. On April 13th, AfriCrypt sent a message to investors that the platform had been hacked. The company said it would cease operations at the beginning of the process “to recover stolen funds and compromised information.”

Affected users have turned to the South African law firm Hanekom Attorneys to clarify the case. Investors were skeptical when the company made the following announcement:

“Customers can proceed legally, but we ask customers to acknowledge that doing so will only delay the recovery process.”

“We immediately became suspicious of this announcement asking investors not to take legal action. Africrypt employees lost access to back-end platforms seven days before the attack was announced, “said Hanekom’s lawyer.

Hanekom’s lawyers claim the brothers transferred 69,000 BTC from AfriCrypt’s accounts and clients’ wallets. At the same time, the two brothers also put money “in different systems on the dark web, which led to strong fragmentation”, which made the investigation even more difficult.

The brothers could not be reached, calls went straight to voicemail, while the AfriCrypt website was also down. The law firm reported the case to an elite National Police unit called “Hawk”.

The Supreme Court of South Africa in South Africa has issued a preliminary arrest warrant for the Cajee brothers. Shortly thereafter, in response to the order, the couple were detained until July 19.

According to the African online crypto news site BitcoinKe, AfriCrypt has attracted customers by targeting high net worth investors and asking them to refer friends while generating profits of up to 10% daily.

Previously, South Africa also had a major Ponzi scam from Mirror Trading International (MTI) cryptocurrency platform. At that time, MTI also promised investors an extremely attractive daily profit of 10%.

MTI has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme this country has ever seen. This scam unit amassed 23,000 BTC (valued at $ 774 million at current prices). MTI boss Johann Steynberg is said to have fled to Brazil when the organization was arrested in 2020 in order to avoid a judicial sentence.

Synthetic

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