There have been several updates to the Africrypt story that broke a few months ago, around what is quite possibly the world’s largest-ever potential cryptocurrency scam.
Now, a US-based South African-born forensic investigator, Hamilton Cheong, is assisting authorities to track where all those bitcoins went. Cheong’s company, Crypto Investigation Bureau, specialises in information security and securing its clients’ crypto-assets.
In this case, they are using a self-developed track-and-trace program called ‘God’s View’ to trace the movement of funds into and out of Africrypt controlled wallets.
Hopefully, Cheong and his team will be able to shed some light on what exactly occurred over at the Cajee brothers run crypto-exchange. Initially, it seemed pretty clear that this was just a rather large Ponzi scheme. Shortly after Africrypt clients found their wallets emptied or inaccessible, they received an email from the Cajee brothers saying they had been hacked and to pretty please not tell the authorities, then they disappeared and could not be contacted. Seems pretty fishy to us.
The truth about Africrypt is hiding somewhere, maybe Tanzania
It was first suspected that the brothers had fled to the UK, but it later came out that they went to Tanzania following alleged death threats to themselves and members of their family. Raees Cajee came out of hiding to oppose the liquidation of Africrypt. He also stated in his affidavit, which was signed in Dar-es-Salaam on 19 July, that the monetary figure was closer to $6 million (R88.5 million) than it was to the reported $3.2 billion (R54 billion).
According to Cheong and his findings so far, events according to Raees Cajee aren’t adding up. The alleged hack on Africrypt wallets originated out of Ukraine according to Cajee but Cheong says the evidence does not support that.
“If this is true, the hackers would have broken through several security layers in a matter of minutes to get to the crypto, and that is extremely unlikely. We don’t think this was a hack. One reason we say this is that four months before the alleged hack, funds were being depleted out of wallets under the control of Africrypt,” Cheong said, according to Moneyweb.
So things aren’t looking too good for the Cajee brothers. Whether they’re guilty or not (and it must be noted under SA law they are innocent until proven otherwise), one thing is clear, there is a definite need for the proper regulation of cryptocurrencies and digital assets in South Africa.
Source: Moneyweb