Primitive Ventures managing partner Dovey Wan said the Chinese police managed to apprehend key suspects in the alleged PlusToken pyramid, the damage from which was tentatively estimated at $3 billion.
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— Dovey Wan 🗝 🦖 (@DoveyWan) August 14, 2019
as per sir @loomdart ‘s request, this thread is abt the on-going sells off made by PLUS Token, the biggest Chinese PONZI which scammed ~70K $BTC + ~ 800K $ETH
I mentioned it briefly in my last Coindesk oped but worth additional attention as it may cause further sells pic.twitter.com/uIjgrzwHET
Dovey Wan added that most of the company's bitcoin addresses belonging to the participants are multi-sig. The police still have not been able to access the funds. It follows that some of the defendants in the case, storing part of the signatures, can still be at large.
According to the audit firm Peckshield, funds from wallets totaling about 1000 BTC in early July began to flow on the Bittrex and Huobi exchanges.
In the next tweet, Wan published two PlusToken-related addresses: one of them has more than 74,000 BTC, the other has more than 95,000 BTC.
She added that those who manage the funds send them to exchanges in relatively small batches, at 50-100 BTC. Wan also called on Peckshield and Chainalysis to deeply understand the problem and track the flow of funds as accurately as possible.
Also, she said, rumors are circulating among Chinese traders that someone allegedly associated with PlusToken is constantly releasing 100 BTC to the Binance.
Recall that in June, the creators of the wallet allegedly disappeared with $3 billion of user funds. Thus, PlusToken may be one of the largest exit scam and Ponzi scheme to date.
PlusToken was launched in 2018 and was positioned as a decentralized solution and an “international cryptocurrency project”, supposedly supported by a team from South Korea and promoted mainly in such Asian countries as China, Japan, Myanmar, Vietnam, as well as in the EU and Russia.
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The company was characterized by clear signs of a financial pyramid. So, investors were offered a referral system and the ability to receive on invested funds monthly from 6% to 19%.
In March, police in southern Hunan initiated an investigation into the PlusToken Ponzi scheme. Since then, the head of the Chinese unit, Chen Bo, has been on the run with five other project-related Chinese citizens.