In a Ponzi scheme named PlusToken, the Chinese Police have taken custody of assets worth more than $4.2 billion in its custody. The crypto assets include Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, USDT, LTC, DOGE, EOS, BCH, and DASH.
According to the latest reports about PlusToken’s case, the Chinese authorities have taken control of the 1% of the total BTC supply, which equals 194,774 Bitcoin.
Seized Cryptocurrencies
Besides Bitcoin, the police have also recovered 833,083 ETH, 1.4 million LTC, 27.6 million EOS, 74,167 DASH, 487 million XRP, six billion DOGE, 79,581 BCH, and 213,724 USDT.
PlusToken Ponzi scheme was first noticed in 2018, and the main culprits behind it used tactics to get money from traders and investors. They asked people to deposit at least $500 in cryptocurrency and promised them to return money in the form of payouts containing additional money. Actually, the exchange had not any existence but pretended as a regulated entity. With fake advertisements, the scammers became successful in snatching about 1% of the total BTC supply while they got control of 5% of all DOGE’s supply.
At the time when the price values of cryptocurrencies were standing at the lowest positions, the worth of these assets was so attractive. The total worth of the crypto assets was equal to $2.2 billion between May 2018 and June 2019.
The district court of Jiangsu, the province of China, started ruling the case in September 2020. From the time of the first ruling over the Ponzi scheme, fifteen people have been convicted so far. The convicted members of the scam project have been sentenced from 2 to eleven years behind the bars. According to the report, one person became successful in laundering $22 million of crypto assets into fiat currency, such as the Chinese yuan. Per the court’s ruling, confiscated digital currencies “will be processed pursuant to laws and the proceeds and gains will be forfeited to the national treasury.”
At the end of July 2020, the local news agency of China reported that the Police arrested 27 significant leaders of the PlusToken along with 83 core members of the entity.
It is one of the major global scams in which scammers became successful in swindling billions of dollars from traders and investors across the world by using cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and other altcoins. And it is also one of the first largest scam cases handled by the Chinese authorities.