Did the $3 billion Chinese Ponzi scheme trigger Bitcoin selloff?
|- Plus Token collected around $3 billion from investors.
- the team behind the scheme are behind bars after arrest by Chinese authorities
Bitcoin has dragged the entire crypto market in turmoil in the last couple of days. This comes after a rough start of the week’s trading on Monday. The selloff experienced could have been triggered by investors aligned to Plus Token Ponzi Scheme as they dumped BTC on exchanges.
A report by Dovey Wan the co-founder of Primitive Ventures said that wallets associated with Plus Token were actively sending funds to cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, Huobi, and Bitrex.
“Many of their BTC addresses are started with P2SH which commonly used for mutil-sig, most likely some ppl who hold the keys are not being caught hence police can’t unlock the wallet
For EOS/ETH wallet can be diff case but so far police was not able to touch any of those,” Wan said in a tweet.”
She added:
“A security audit firm Peckshield has done a graph analysis of the money flow from PlusToken’s wallet in early July, and figured out abt total ~1000 has gone into Bitrrex and Huobi. So basically the sells off has started around early July.”
Plus Token launched around May 2018. The platform promised its members a 6 -18% monthly return on investment. It also has a four-tire membership structure. Wan outlines that, the project collected around $3 billion from investors.
While the team behind the scheme are behind bars after arrest by Chinese authorities, the wallets remained active. Wan said that the transfers are being carried out in small batches of 50 BTC to 100 BTC. Chainalysis research firm has been asked to monitor the addresses and provide a report on the same.
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