Ponzi schemes are common, Africrypt ran away, and investors lost up to $3.6 billion

The two brothers who founded the South African cryptocurrency trading platform Africrypt disappeared completely after falsely reporting a "hacker attack" to their customers. This "runaway" incident directly caused investors to lose up to $3.6 billion in funds.

According to Bloomberg, Hanekom Attorneys, a Cape Town-based law firm hired by investors in the project, said it has no way of finding the brothers, who fled with a large amount of Bitcoin. The police and financial regulator the Financial Sector Conduct Authority are also handling the case, and the law firm has reportedly notified cryptocurrency exchanges around the world that if any of them try to convert these Bitcoins into fiat or alternative currencies, they should immediately contact the police to track them down.

The media pointed out that if confirmed, the Africrypt case may have caused the "largest loss in the history of cryptocurrency scams." The platform was founded in 2019 by two brothers, Cajee, aged 20 and 21, and promised huge returns of up to 11% on cryptocurrency staking.

Alarm bells began ringing in April, when Africrypt COO Ameer Cajee, one of the two founders, told investors that the company had been hacked, but he told them not to report the incident to the police and lawyers because it might "delay the platform's recovery process."

But some investors immediately realized the danger and contacted lawyers to draft documents to get their tokens back. One investor group hired Hanekom Law, while another group launched a liquidation bid for Africrypt.

However, the brothers seemed to have planned their actions long ago. Hanekom claimed that "Africrypt employees had lost access to the platform's backend seven days before the alleged hack." Africrypt's escrow funds were transferred "from its South African accounts and customer wallets" to "large Bitcoin mixer pools" in an untraceable manner in preparation for their escape. The company's two founders then went missing.

Wan Hui, founder of The Primitive Crypto, said on Twitter that Africrypt's "runaway" reminded her of "what happened to PlusToken back then."

Posts on Reddit say the case looks like a very obvious "honeypot" scam, while one poster claims the brothers fled to the UK two days after notifying investors of the "hack." Reddit users also compared the case to that of the "missing crypto queen" OneCoin founder Ruja Ignatova, who remains missing after disappearing in 2017, while other OneCoin masterminds are now serving prison sentences.