Chinese Police seized crypto assets worth more than $4.2 billion, which were directly involved in the Ponzi Scheme PlusToken. This scheme managed to exploit over two million people and, 15 suspects have been arrested so far.
As reported by The Block, the Chinese Authorities managed to seize a total of 194,775 BTC, which represents 1% of the total supply of the world’s largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. The judgment was made public on the 19th of November, and the Intermediate People’s Court has finally listed the crypto assets seized by police over the PlusToken Ponzi scheme.
Apart from Bitcoin, the authorities have managed to seize 833,083 ETH, 1.4 M LTC, 27.6 M EOS, 74,167 DASH, 487 M XRP, B DOGE, 79,581 BCH and 213,724 USDT. Total assets worth approximately $4.2 billion as per today’s prices.
The Ponzi scheme PlusToken boasted of a trading platform that promised higher returns for deposits over $500 worth of crypto assets. This crypto trading platform was a non-existent platform, and they ran advertisements to lure the clients in and managed to gather 1% of total Bitcoin supply in the world and 0.73% of total Ethereum supply too.
The judgment issued by the Chinese court, range from 2 to 11 years imprisonment with fines up to $1 million.
The complete sentence also revealed:
“the seized digital currencies will be processed pursuant to laws and the proceeds and gains will be forfeited to the national treasury.”
The scheme managed to exploit over 2 million investors, and so far, authorities managed to arrest 15 suspects. One of the suspects has already successfully laundered crypto assets worth over $22 million into the Chinese Yuan. The Police have found out that closer to $19 million of the laundered money was spent by the suspects to finance their luxury lives.
However, with this incident, China ended up being one of the largest Bitcoin holders in the world. The country also controls half of the Bitcoin’s hash rate as well.
