In April, Africrypt customers received notifications of an alleged hack. Lawyers hired by the investors tried to contact the Cajee brothers.
The Cajee Brothers, co-founders of the South African investment platform Africrypt, suddenly disappeared. According to various reports, the Cajee brothers have suddenly dissapeared with at least 69,000 bitcoins from their investors.
The Cajee brothers reportedly notified their clients in April this year of an alleged hack. Bloomberg said that after contacting lawyers hired by the investors, the notification from Ameer, the eldest of the brothers, suggested the clients avoid filing a report of the theft to the authorities. According to the statement, that would slow down the process of taking back the affected funds.
A group of skeptical investors contacted the law firm Hanekom Attorneys, to take the case. In their investigations, the lawyers found various suspicious hints, such as the fact that Africrypt employees lost complete access to the platform’s system just a week before the alleged theft happened.
The Cajee brothers disappeared from the crypto-world
Neither of the Cajee brothers has shown their faces to the public to speak about the incident. Contact attempts by the attorneys have been unsuccessful, and calls to both their phones get redirected to voicemail.
The Cape Town-based law firm reportedly contacted an elite unit of the South African national police, known as the Falcons, to find the location of the alleged scammers.
The investigation also revealed that the funds left Africrypt wallets, and then passed through mixing services and other platforms, making it hard to track lost BTCs. Meanwhile, the platform’s website listed on Crunchbase is also down.
According to African media such as bitcoinke.io, the Cajees are famous for sharing photos of their lifestyle through social networks. In the meantime, The South African newspaper shared a photo of the two brothers at what appears to be a racing event. Other pictures linked from Instagram vanished from the platform.
One of the Biggest Bitcoin Crimes in History
The 69,000 bitcoins allegedly stolen by the Cajee brothers surpassed $ 4.4 billion in April, during the peak that took the cryptocurrency to a new all-time high in price, above $ 64,000 per unit.
This theft would be the most significant bitcoin crime in history, taking into account the stolen amounts compared with its dollar equivalent. However, the total BTC stolen from investors on the platform is well below the hundreds of thousands of bitcoins stolen during the Mt. Gox hacks in 2011and 2014.
Or the almost 120,000 BTC they stole from Bitfinex in 2016. But with bitcoin going through such a low price, the dollar figure does not reach that of Africrypt.
Between 2019 and 2020, two big thefts of BTC and other cryptocurrencies took place in China. A scam by the creators of the WoToken Ponzi would have generated the theft of about 1,100 million dollars by stealing 46,000 bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies from the company’s clients.
By: Jenson Nuñez
