The saga with one of the largest alleged scam projects in the cryptocurrency world continues. PlusToken’s officials were arrested several months ago, but a recent report shows that over $100 million worth of Ethereum was transferred from a company wallet to an unknown one.
$100 In ETH Transferred From PlusToken
The popular cryptocurrency monitoring resource, Whale Alert, recently caught a large transaction of 789,525 ETH worth over $105 million at the time. What’s conspicuous about it is that it originated from PlusToken’s wallet.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 789,525 #ETH (105,099,509 USD) transferred from PlusToken to unknown wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) December 19, 2019
The transaction took place earlier today; however, the recipient address is unknown. As already six members of the initial team have been arrested, the community speculates that at least one is still at large and is currently accessing the funds.
PlusToken’s Alleged Scam History
PlusToken saw the light of day as a cryptocurrency wallet that can actually generate high rates of return to its users. All they had to do is purchase the PLUS crypto tokens with Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the returns would be generated by “exchange profit, mining income, and referral benefits.”
Even though this might sound fishy at the moment, PlusToken became popular in China, being listed on several exchanges in the country. Moreover, it reached a price of $350 per token before it started melting down as the community began noticing irregularities and authorities started cracking down on it.
Beijing claimed that PlusToken is an illegal Ponzi scheme, and Chinese law enforcement went to Vanuatu to make the mentioned above arrest of six people. Later, the police officers deported all of them to mainland China.
After the arrests, a Chainalysis report tracked at least 800,000 ETH and 45,000 BTC being transferred from PlusToken official wallets to the scammers’ own addresses to launder. It also says that another 790,000 ETH were untouched in another wallet, which could be today’s major transaction.
Is PlusToken To Blame For The Price Crash?
The cryptocurrency market lost around $12 billion of its total market cap after a few consecutive days of negative price movements. Bitcoin’s price, for example, touched $6,400, while Ethereum went below $120, Litecoin was at $35, and more.
The same report was released a few hours before the price decline began, and it also shows that liquidations of such a notable amount of cryptocurrencies could be behind the drop.
According to it, the scammers had cashed out $185 million worth of stolen digital assets using OTC brokers. However, Chainalysis couldn’t confirm for sure if the liquidation is to blame for the price decline but noted that it was plausible:
However, we can say that those cashouts cause increased volatility in Bitcoin’s price and that they correlate significantly with Bitcoin price drops.
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