"Based in China, PlusToken presented itself as a cryptocurrency wallet that would reward users with high rates of return if they purchased the wallet’s associated PLUS cryptocurrency tokens with Bitcoin or Ethereum. The scammers claimed those returns would be generated by “exchange profit, mining income, and referral benefits.” PlusToken would go on to be listed on several Chinese exchanges and hit a peak price of $350 USD, raking in “investments” from millions of people.
Chinese media reports that the scam attracted over $3 billion worth of cryptocurrency. We tracked a total of 180,000 BTC, 6,400,000 ETH, 111,000 USDT, and 53 OMG (OmiseGo) that went from scam victims to PlusToken wallets, equating to roughly $2 billion. Either figure would make PlusToken one of the largest Ponzi schemes ever.
While six individuals connected to PlusToken were arrested in June, the stolen funds have continued to move through wallets and be cashed out through independent OTC brokers operating mostly on the Huobi platform, showing that one or more of the scammers are still at large.
While we tracked $2 billion worth of various cryptocurrencies that victims sent to the PlusToken scammers, some of that money was paid out to early investors, presumably to maintain the illusion of high returns while PlusToken presented itself as a legitimate company. In many cases, it’s difficult to tell whether transfers made by the PlusToken scammers were going to those early investors or to addresses under their own control. Nonetheless, we’ve tracked roughly 800,000 ETH and 45,000 BTC we can definitively say the scammers transferred to their own addresses to launder. They’ve cashed out at least 10,000 of that initial 800,000 ETH, while the other 790,000 has been sitting untouched in a single Ethereum wallet for months.
The flow of the 45,000 stolen Bitcoin is more complicated. So far, roughly 25,000 of it has been cashed out. The other 20,000 is currently spread out across more than 8,700 cryptocurrency addresses, which speaks to the high level of effort the scammers put into obfuscating the movement of funds. The scammers have transferred the Bitcoin more than 24,000 times, using more than 71,000 different addresses — and that’s not even counting cash outs or transfers to off-ramps such as exchanges.
Many of those transactions were conducted through mixers like Wasabi Wallet, which utilizes the CoinJoin protocol to make it more difficult to trace the path of funds. You can see an example in the Chainalysis Reactor graph below. "
https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/plustoken-scam-bitcoin-price
Chinese media reports that the scam attracted over $3 billion worth of cryptocurrency. We tracked a total of 180,000 BTC, 6,400,000 ETH, 111,000 USDT, and 53 OMG (OmiseGo) that went from scam victims to PlusToken wallets, equating to roughly $2 billion. Either figure would make PlusToken one of the largest Ponzi schemes ever.
While six individuals connected to PlusToken were arrested in June, the stolen funds have continued to move through wallets and be cashed out through independent OTC brokers operating mostly on the Huobi platform, showing that one or more of the scammers are still at large.
While we tracked $2 billion worth of various cryptocurrencies that victims sent to the PlusToken scammers, some of that money was paid out to early investors, presumably to maintain the illusion of high returns while PlusToken presented itself as a legitimate company. In many cases, it’s difficult to tell whether transfers made by the PlusToken scammers were going to those early investors or to addresses under their own control. Nonetheless, we’ve tracked roughly 800,000 ETH and 45,000 BTC we can definitively say the scammers transferred to their own addresses to launder. They’ve cashed out at least 10,000 of that initial 800,000 ETH, while the other 790,000 has been sitting untouched in a single Ethereum wallet for months.
The flow of the 45,000 stolen Bitcoin is more complicated. So far, roughly 25,000 of it has been cashed out. The other 20,000 is currently spread out across more than 8,700 cryptocurrency addresses, which speaks to the high level of effort the scammers put into obfuscating the movement of funds. The scammers have transferred the Bitcoin more than 24,000 times, using more than 71,000 different addresses — and that’s not even counting cash outs or transfers to off-ramps such as exchanges.
Many of those transactions were conducted through mixers like Wasabi Wallet, which utilizes the CoinJoin protocol to make it more difficult to trace the path of funds. You can see an example in the Chainalysis Reactor graph below. "
https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/plustoken-scam-bitcoin-price