PlusToken Scammers Dumping BTC, Blamed for Price Drop

The Bitcoin? market has, over the last 48 hours, suffered a rather substantial crash in price that has since the major cryptocurrency? fall below the $10,000 mark briefly. At first, some thought that the easing of political tension across the globe could explain why things were turning around for Bitcoin?, but there may be more to it. 

PlusToken, a Ponzi scheme in China that has an ongoing investigation surrounding it, is reportedly in the process of trying to get out its stolen $3 billion in Bitcoin?, Ether and EOS. It has been said that wallets associated with the scam have been leaking coins at a regular rate onto different cryptocurrency? exchanges in an attempt to free up the money and make off with it. 

Chinese Police have been involved in bringing this scam to justice after it appeared that the platform, which had been running since mid-2018 had suddenly performed an exit scheme. This led the police to the small pacific Island of Vanuatu where they arrested six Chinese Nationals thought to be the founders of the scheme. 

However, those who escaped prosecution appear to still have control over the wallets where the funds have been kept and are now siphoning off those funds in small batches in order to try and get their dues. This dumping of coins could even be the reason why Bitcoin?'s price has tumbled as there is $3 billion worth of coins to dump. 

The biggest Chinese Ponzi scheme

The call to the attention of this dump was brought forward by Dovey Wan, founding partner of blockchain?-based investment company Primitive Ventures. She has had her finger on the pulse of this scam for some time and describes its origins. 

“JUST IN - as per sir @loomdart‘s request, this thread is about the on-going sells off made by PLUS Token?, the biggest Chinese PONZI which scammed ~70K $BTC + ~ 800K $ETH.” 

I mentioned it briefly in my last Coindesk oped but worth additional attention as it may cause further sells,” she tweeted. “PlusToken started in mid 2018, was a pure ponzi with a wallet? front with offers “high yield investment return”. 

“It has 4 layers of membership structure, each will get diff % of rebate. In early 2019, it claimed its membership has over 10M.” 

She went on to attach a number of addresses known to be associated with PlusToken which showed a stream of coins slowly leaking off the wallets on different exchanges.

A need for blacklisting

Wan is calling on exchanges to blacklist some of these addresses to try and stop any more funds making it out of the blockchain? and funding the scammers. Allegedly, the funds had been leaving the wallets on batches of 50 and 100 BTC, but there was also reports early on from Chinese traders of a constant dump onto Binance of 100 tranches of coins.

Chinese Police will surely step up their investigation further with evidence supporting the fact that the stolen funds are still availible to those who are still at large.