Chinese Ponzi Scheme Caused The Latest Bitcoin Sell-Off

Chinese Ponzi scheme was the reason for the latest Bitcoin-sell off according to the Primitive founder Dovey Wan as we are reading in the latest cryptocurrency news today.

The PlusToken Ponzi scheme scammed more than 200K BTC and 800K ETH and are now hitting hard on the exchanges. What started in the middle of 2018, PlusToken was a classic Chinese Ponzi scheme offering high-yield investment returns. There four about four layers of membership structure offering some increasing dividends. By the start of 2019, there were more than 10 million members. The entire team of the scheme was caught by the police two months ago and will now stay in jail for many years according to Wan. However, the $3 billion of cryptocurrency they scammed out of members has not been recovered yet. Many of the Bitcoin wallet addresses which were used are not believed to be multi-sig which leads to speculation that some of the key holders remain at large.

The security audit company Peckshield has been monitoring some money-flow activities from the PlusToken wallets and has found that since early-July, more than 1000 BTC has gone into Bittrex and Huobi and some of the funds were moved into small batches of 50 and 100 bitcoins per batch. Some reports even claim that the Chinese traders noticed that someone was also consistently dumping 100BTC batches into Binance and they believe they are related to PlusToken.

According to Wan as we have red in the altcoin news previously, there are three reasons why the exchanges didn’t pay attention. One of the main reasons is that the scam has not been known outside China and maybe South Korea. The Chinese exchanges did not act because the case has been closed officially by the Chinese police. The police also didn’t work with the exchanges because the exchanges are officially banned in China. Now, both Chainalysis and Peckshield are monitoring the coins involved in the scam but the exchanges now also got involved. There is little that can be done about the tokens that were already cashed out but the exchanges are able to freeze the income tokens relating to known scams.