South African Brothers Escape With $3.6 Billion In Bitcoin

Keshav Verma

1 year ago

3 mins read

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Two African brothers have disappeared, and so does the $3.6 billion in bitcoin from their cryptocurrency investment platform.

Biggest Scam In Bitcoin History?

Africrypt is a cryptocurrency investment platform based in South Africa. It was set up by Ameer Cajee and his brother. The pool offered huge returns for investors.

Back in April, around when BTC was riding high, Chief Operating Officer Cajee announced that the company was under a hack.

In the notification, however, Cajee asked investors not to seek legal help as it will slow down the recovery process.

It was immediately a red sign, and some investors hired Hanekom Attorneys, a law firm, to look into the case.

Reports say that Africrypt employees lost access to backend servers a week before Cajee revealed the alleged hack to the investors.

Hanekom Attorneys found that the Bitcoin from the Africrypt pool has been sent through methods that make it hard to trace. Such methods include sending the coins to other large pools, or through tumblers and mixers.

The company website is down. And Cajee and his brother, Raees, have their phone numbers set to voicemail. They have disappeared, along with almost 69,000 Bitcoins.

Africa’s Finance Sector Conduct Authority is also looking into the case. However, as Bitcoin isn’t considered a legal financial asset, the organization hasn’t been able to launch a formal investigation.

Now, according to reports, Hanekom Attorneys has reported to the Hawks, an elite group of the police force, regarding the disappearance of the two brothers.

The law firm has also alerted global crypto exchanges to report if there are any attempts to sell off the stolen Bitcoins.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in the country. Just last year, another company, Mirror Trading International, was involved in a case where investors had lost $1.2 billion in Bitcoins.

The nearly 69,000 Bitcoins stolen in the Africrypt case were worth more than $4 billion during April when the incident occurred. Around three times as much as the fraud in 2020, which was dubbed as the biggest cryptocurrency scam in 2020.

The African brothers scam is possibly the biggest in the entire history of the cryptocurrency, and it might provoke governments to become serious about crypto regulation.

Bitcoin Price

Bitcoin is a little under $35k at the time of writing. The coin is up 4.1% in the past 24 hours, but down 7.6% in the last 7 days.

Here is a chart that shows how the price of the cryptocurrency has changed in the past few months:

Bitcoin seems to show a slight upwards trend | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Some experts believe we could see the currency drop down a bit, and then return on a bullish path.

However, nothing is clear at the moment, and it’s possible a bearish pattern might end up clawing the market.

Keshav Verma

Keshav is currently a senior writer at NewsBTC and has been attached to the website since June 14, 2021.

Keshav has been writing for many years, first as a hobbyist and later as a freelancer. He has experience working in a variety of niches, even fiction at one point, but the cryptocurrency industry has been the longest he has been attached to.

In terms of official educational qualifications, Keshav holds a bachelor’s degree in Physics from one of the premier institutes of India, the University of Delhi (DU). He started the degree with an aim of eventually making a career in Physics, but the onset of COVID led to a shift in plans. The virus meant that the college classes had to be delivered in the online-mode and with it came free time for him to explore other passions.

Initially only seeking to make some beer money, Keshav unexpectedly landed clients offering real projects, after which there was no looking back. Writing was something he had always enjoyed and to be able to do it for a living was like a dream come true.

Keshav completed his Physics degree in 2022 and has been focusing on his writing career since, but that doesn’t mean his passion for Physics has ended. He eventually plans to re-enter university to obtain a masters degree in the same field, but perhaps only to satiate his own interest rather than for using it as a means to find employment..

Keshav has found blockchain and its concepts fascinating ever since he started going down the rabbit-hole back in 2020. On-chain analysis in particular has been something he likes to research more about, which is why his NewsBTC pieces tend to involve it in some form.

Being of the science background, Keshav likes if concepts are clear and consistent, so he generally explains the indicators he talks about in a bit of detail so that the readers can perhaps come out having understood and learnt something new.

As for hobbies, Keshav is super into football, anime, and videogames. He enjoys football not only as a watcher, but also as a player. For games, Keshav generally tends towards enjoying singleplayer adventures, with EA FC (formerly FIFA) being the only online game he is active in. Though, perhaps due to being ultra-focused on the game, he is today a semi-pro on the EA FC scene, regularly participating in tournaments and sometimes even taking back prize money.

Because of his enthusiasm for anime and games, he also self-learned Japanese along the way to consume some of the untranslated gems out there. The skill didn’t merely remain as just a hobby, either, as he put it to productive use during his exploration for small-time gigs at the start of COVID, fulfilling a couple of Japanese-to-English translation jobs.

Keshav is also big into fitness, with agility and acceleration-related workouts making a big part of his program due to the relevance they have in football. On top of that, he also has a more traditional strength based program for the gym, which he does to maintain an overall fitness level of his body.

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