AfriCrypt appears to be the biggest scam ever in the crypto world, with the investment platform's administrators fleeing and 69.000 BTC missing.
This Thursday it was announced that the Cajee brothers, Raees and Ameer, aged 17 and 20 and administrators of the company AfriCrypt, are missing. Investors, who had deposited a multimillion-dollar sum in the cryptocurrency platform, warn that the brothers of South African origin "do not appear" anywhere, and are suspected of having perpetrated the largest scam in the world of cryptocurrencies. cryptocurrencies, .
AfriCrypt held a fund of 69.000 BTC, valued at around $3.600 billion, at the time the brothers claimed they had been hacked.
In April this year, AfriCrypt warned investors about a hack, which directly affected the cryptocurrency investment platform. According to the statement that Ameer, the eldest of the brothers, shared with investors, they would see their accounts and funds on the platform blocked until they resolved the problem. Ameer also asked investors not to file complaints with the police authorities so as not to “slow down” the recovery of funds. However, investors who were skeptical of this version decided to take matters into their own hands and hired Hanekom Attorneys, a law firm based in Cape Town, he said. Bloomberg, to investigate the disappearance of the funds.
The group of lawyers filed a complaint with the competent authorities and generated an alert to prevent the brothers from trying to exchange the funds using any cryptocurrency exchange platform.
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The beginning of a big scam
First, the lawyers point out that AfriCrypt employees lost access to back-end platforms seven days before the alleged attack. This seems to be a clear indication of what the Cajee brothers were up to.
The report also states that lawyers were immediately suspicious of the announcement Ameer shared, imploring investors not to take legal action against the company. Attempts to contact Raees and Ameer Cajee have also been in vain, with all calls being diverted to a voicemail service, as are calls to the company’s numbers. AfriCrypt’s website is also down.
As if that weren’t enough, the law firm’s investigators discovered that funds handled by AfriCrypt were emptied from the company’s South African accounts and also from clients’ wallets. In addition to this, the bitcoin funds were sent to mixing services to make them “essentially untraceable.”
Big losses for investors
Although investors have not given up hope of finding the brothers and recovering their funds, the losses they could suffer could be the largest in the industry in terms of US dollars.
After Mirror Trading International, AfriCrypt may be the biggest scam ever seen in the cryptocurrency world.
Given the situation, many Bitcoin HODLers point out that AfriCrypt investors should have been suspicious of the potential scam from the start, as the company promised extremely high returns for an industry widely known for its high volatility.
Initially, AfriCrypt, which opened in 2019, provided excellent returns for investors. However, Bitcoin's peak of $64.000 in mid-April could have sparked the Cajee brothers' greed. Then, the brutal fall in the crypto markets could have made the scam completely unsustainable.
Regulation as protection for investors
Bloomberg analysts say that South African regulators’ slow approach to the cryptocurrency industry and the uncertainty they have created around it has allowed “crypto havens” to lure large numbers of unsuspecting investors into their traps.
It is important to remember that South Africa is one of the countries where there has been a great appetite for cryptocurrencies and digital assets. However, many of the companies that provide services in the country are not regulated, simply because the country does not yet have a clear regulatory framework applicable to this industry. Currently, several of the country's regulators and major banks are working on formulating new regulations for cryptocurrencies, but they remain somewhat fragmented in their approaches and opinions.
Cryptocurrencies are a growing decentralized and autonomous financial ecosystem capable of offering great value opportunities to all its investors alike. However, being a relatively new industry, it has been exploited by many scammers looking to make easy and effortless money. The lack of knowledge and misinformation of many people regarding cryptocurrencies and how they work has also made them easy prey for these “crypto predators.”
MtGox, which was once one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, was the victim of a hack in 2014 that stripped it of around 850.000 BTC. To date, the thousands of investors and users who were affected have not been able to recover their funds. In South Africa, Mirror Trading International It was known in 2020 as the biggest scam of the year, as its founder also disappeared with 23.000 BTC from investors. WoToken was another well-known case that ended in losses of over 40.000 BTC, valued at over $1.100 billion at the time of the scam.
In the face of the facts, we must not forget the motto “Not your keys; “not your Bitcoin” (not your keys, not your bitcoins) with which he was born Bitcoin, which works as a decentralized financial system without intermediaries, capable of giving us true freedom and independence over our finances.
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