Topic: Founders of South African Bitcoin exchange disappear after $3.6 billion 'hack' - page 3. (Read 783 times)

Cryptocurrency investors in South Africa may have lost nearly $3.6 billion in Bitcoin following the disappearance of two brothers associated with one of the country’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. According to Bloomberg, a law firm in Cape Town says it can’t locate Ameer and Raees Cajee, the founders of Africrypt. In April, the exchange told its investors it was the victim of a hack and asked them not to report the incident to the authorities on account it would “slow down” the process of recovering their missing money.

Some of those involved in the exchange hired Hanekom Attorneys, the law firm that said it couldn’t find the two brothers, to investigate the incident. It found that someone had withdrawn Africrypt’s pooled funds from the local accounts and client wallets where the coins were stored originally and put them through tumblers and mixers, making it difficult (though not impossible) to trace the money. “Africrypt employees lost access to the back-end platforms seven days before the alleged hack,” the law firm told Bloomberg. The outlet attempted to call both Cajee brothers multiple times only to get their voicemail each time.

Complicating any recovery attempt is that South Africa’s Finance Sector Conduct Authority can’t launch a formal investigation into the incident because cryptocurrency isn’t legally considered a financial product in the country. If no one can recover the money, it will go down as the largest cryptocurrency loss in history, easily overshadowing the approximately $200 million CAD that disappeared when the founder of Canada’s QuadrigaCX exchange died while travelling in India.

Here is the latest news:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57582805

The two brothers have claims that they have received death threats from investors in South Africa. This is classic style of how financial criminals work. If they can claim that their lives are under threat in South Africa, then the British courts will never deport them back to SA. And the British system takes the case favorably, unless some of the British nationals have lost money. Since it is the South Africans who have been scammed, the British government is going to tolerate their presence in UK. In the past, dozens of financial criminals have migrated to the UK from countries such as India, Greece and Russia, to take advantage of the "open doors" policy meted out by the British government.

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So this makes it the largest loss of bitcoin under such circumstances when you consider the contemporary value of the coins lost.  The exchange, Africrypt, told investors they were the victim of a hack and not to alert the authorities, you know, cuz that's super legitimate.  Some law firm attempting to investigate have tracked the stolen coins to tumblers and mixers to try and obscure where the stolen bitcoin was going.  I guess it remains to be determined if they were actually hacked or stole the money themselves, but the two founding brothers can't be found.