TWO SOUTH AFRICAN BROTHERS HAVE STOLEN $3.6 BILLION IN BITCOINS

Two South African brothers, who launched the Africrypt investment platform in 2019, disappeared, having committed the biggest ever digital currency scam. Elder brother Ameer Cajee and his twenty-year-old brother Raees made away, taking cryptocurrency deposits of clients worth $ 3.6 billion with them.

Attempts to reach each of the Africrypt founders on a mobile phone were unsuccessful. All calls were automatically switched to the voicemail. At the same time, the company's website stopped working.

Investors hired a capital legal company to find Cajee, but Cape Town detectives were also unable to find the fugitives.

In the end, the information was passed on to the ‘hawks’, a special elite South African Police Service (SAPS) special crime investigation unit (DPCI).

As noted by Bloomberg, the first concerns about the possibility of fraud on the part of the platform owners among investors arose in April, when the bitcoin rate soared, setting new price records. Then Ameer Cajee, who served as the chief operating officer of Africrypt, informed clients that the company had been hacked. At the same time, the co-owner asked not to report the incident to the authorities or legal services, as this could have slowed down the process of recovering the missing assets.

Some clients did not believe the information and turned to the law firm Hanekom Attorneys, while others launched a formal liquidation process against the platform. Lawyers from Hanekom, having immediately doubted the veracity of the information about the hacking because of the request not to file lawsuits, began an investigation. As a result, it was found that the company's employees had lost the ability to manage information on the server at least a week before the alleged hacking.

Subsequently, it turned out that Africrypt's assets were withdrawn from clients' wallets and accounts in South Africa through the so-called ‘tumblers’ (mixers) - special anonymization services that complicate the ability to track digital currency transactions.

Some funds were transferred through mining pools, which makes it almost impossible to trace them.

The financial management of the South Africa is also interested in what happened, but the problem is complicated by the fact that the regulator cannot conduct an official investigation. As the head of the legal department of the service, Brandon Topham, noted, crypto assets in the republic are not considered as financial products.

Now the regulators in many African countries can step up their efforts to put things in order with the cryptocurrency, believe the expert. In January 2021, the cost of trading digital assets exceeded $ 141 million (R 2 billion) in South Africa alone. After the bitcoin rate rose sharply last year, the current 69-thousand coins scam could become the largest cryptocurrency scam ever.