Bitcoin and Crypto Worth $4 Billion Seized From PlusToken Ponzi Group

Chinese authorities seized around $4 billion worth of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies from the notorious crypto Ponzi group PlusToken. This comes after the Chinese police arrested the core team running the scheme in July.

Around $4 Billion Worth Of Bitcoin And Crypto Assets Seized

According to CryptoPotato’s previous report on the PlusToken saga, the crypto shysters (27 key operators) were arrested by the Chinese police in July earlier this year. Along with them, the police also arrested 82 other members.

Now according to the latest reports, Chinese authorities have confiscated close to $4 billion worth of bitcoin and cryptocurrency holdings from PlusToken operators. Estimates say that they duped much more than this amount by beguiling investors.

Cryptocurrencies collected from users as a joining fee were valued at at least 14.8 billion yuan ($2.3 billion) as of June 2019…

The document released by the ruling court also mentioned the details of the seized crypto stash: 94,775 BTC, 833,083 ETH, 487 million XRP, 79,581 BCH, 1.4 million LTC, 27.6 million EOS, 74,167 DASH, 6 billion Doge, and 213,724 USDT.

On a rough calculation, the value works out to be a little over $4 billion. As per the court’s observations:

The platform had no actual operations or functions. The accused used the digital assets for expenses including paying employees, and sold some of them to buy properties and luxury cars for themselves or relatives.

Also, a few organizers of the PlusToken scam hid and transferred bitcoin and crypto-assets worth about 150 million yuan (~$23 million) at the time. This resulted in some losses, according to the document.

The Scam Story Continues With COVID-19 And DeFi

It doesn’t come as a surprise that the cryptocurrency space is scam-laced. The modus operandi of scammers has changed, though. The onset of COVID-19 scammers motivated them to milk the pandemic and fleece unsuspecting investors dry.

Perpetrators used various methods, such as impersonating popular health and charity organizations. Despite the visible differences in terms of content and requests, the online robbers asked for payments to be made in bitcoin.

Apart from the above, the cryptocurrency ecosystem’s hottest space (read DeFi) too has become a breeding ground for innumerable scams and Ponzi schemes. As per a recent report, an anonymous DeFi user reportedly lost around $140,000 worth of Uniswap UNI tokens to a yield farming scam.

The above wannabe yield farmer intended to leverage the yield farming hype by putting some of his UNI tokens in UniCats, a new DeFi scheme (like many others). UniCats allowed investors to farm its MEOW tokens, after which they can withdraw their tokens.

But, things didn’t go as planned as malicious codes in the project’s contract allowed the fraudulent developers to withdraw the victim’s UNI tokens. This theft was possible because of an earlier approval grant by Doe for the project to spend an unlimited number of UNI tokens.

The rogue devs made away with 36,000 UNI tokens in two rounds bringing the rogue actor’s loot to about $140,000.