Two South African Brothers Disappear With $3.6B Worth Of Bitcoin In Biggest Scam To Date

Ameer and Raees Cajee, founders of South African crypto exchange Africrypt, have reportedly disappeared with 69,000 Bitcoin BTC/USD $3.6 billion worth of client funds.

In doing so, twenty-year-old Ameer Cajee and his seventeen-year-old brother Raees Cajee may have pulled off the biggest exit scam in history.

What Happened: According to a report from Bloomberg, the scam dates back to mid-April, when AfriCrypt’s investors were notified in an email that the platform was shutting down and freezing all accounts following a hack that compromised client accounts, wallets, and nodes.

The founders also advised the investors against reporting the hack to law enforcement, claiming it would “slow down the recovery process.”

“We were immediately suspicious as the announcement implored investors not to take legal action,” said South African law firm Hanekom Attorneys.

“Africrypt employees lost access to the back-end platforms seven days before the alleged hack.”

What Else: An investigation revealed that the Cajee brothers had pooled together the investor funds from an account at Johannesburg-based First National Bank (FNB) before disappearing.

The pooled funds are also virtually untraceable after having gone through several coin mixers.

South Africa’s Finance Sector Conduct Authority currently can't investigate Africrypt given that crypto assets are “not legally considered financial products,” but the case is being handled by an elite unit of the national police force.

Price Action: At press time, Bitcoin was trading at $34,753, up 4.17% in the past 24-hours.

The leading cryptocurrency had a daily trading volume of $32 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.