Investors Are Seeking Criminal Charges After BTC Theft In South Africa

Investors are seeking criminal charges after a major Bitcoin theft occurred in South Africa as we can see more today in our latest Bitcoin news.

Ameer Cajee and Raees are the brothers behind crypto platform Africrypt hasn’t been seen after they made off with $3.6 billion in BTC last summer. Amid the recent dip on the market, pegging the stolen sum at about $2.9 billion, the victims are demanding criminal charges to be made. The investors are seeking criminal charges now and as Sean Pierce of Coast to Coast Special Investigations said:

“We are pushing for the brothers to be charged for fraud, theft, possibly money laundering. They can get 10 to 15 years for a first-time offense.”

Pierce clarified that the final decision to go ahead with the prosecution hasn’t been made yet. Rashaad Moosa who is the lawyer of Africrypt said the prosecution will be hard to pursue because the investors signed agreements to transfer the claims to the Dubai-based company called Pennython Project Management LLC. The Dubai Company offered the investor payouts and Moosa claimed that the investors no longer hold rights to any interest.

A year ago, about 69,000 BTC in investors’ funds were reported missing from the exchange, and the brothers that operated the exchange disappeared. Affricrypt stopped all operations in 2021 when BTC was approaching the all-time high of $64,000 due to a breach in the systems. The investors were told to report the incident to the authorities because it made it harder to recover the funds. Right after, the two brothers transferred the funds using coin-mixing services to obfuscate the source of the funds. The location of the brothers is still uknown and at the start of the saga, some speculation suggested they fled to the UK.

As recently reported, Bitcoin ponzi scammer Johann Steynberg was arrested in Brazil a few days ago after disappearing with 29,000 BTC. Steynberg is a South African known for running the multi-million dollar Ponzi Scheme platform Mirror Trading International and was recently arrested in Brazil. This was another large-scale arrest for the country after the arrest of Claudio Oliveira of the Bitcoin Banco group who disappeared with 7000 BTC from his investors in 2019. The Bitcoin ponzi scammer managed to defraud thousands of people worldwide after creating a Ponzi scheme and promising high returns of up to 10% and according to the reports, more than 29,000 BTC were stolen by his company