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.
From Endgadget:
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 It found that someone had withdrawn Africrypt’s pooled funds from the local accounts and client wallets where the coins were stored originally and put them through tumblers and mixers, making it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.
Like what other people think, I also see this as an insider job. The timing of disappearance of the founders of the exchange after the hacking incident looks very suspiscious to me. It doesn't look like it is just a coincidence. I think it is planned. A well-executed escape after stealing all the money of its users. Certainly, its users must be regretting big time that they opted to store their funds in an exchange. A platform that doesn't allow you to have the full autonomy over your money is really risky when it comes to provided security.
To add, I think its really risky to let a teenager, not yet of legal age to handle a billion-worth business. It's nice that a teenager has a mindset of being business-oriented, however, they should have at least mentored him until he turned 18 years of age. I just hope that they would recover the funds though because it's a hefty amount.
