The Chinese authorities have sent the scammers of the PlusToken Ponzi scheme behind jail for 11 years. The core actors in the fraudulent activity scammed people of $2.25 billion in crypto assets.
As reported by the South China Morning Post, the illegal actions of culprits have been proved in the courts, and the Chinese court has sentenced the principal criminals in PlusToken for 11 years.
The Arrest of 27 Keys Members
It was reported in July 2020 that the Chinese authorities have arrested 27 core members who have a major role in scamming activity, but they also took 82 other people who were indirectly linked to the Ponzi scheme.
Law enforcement agencies in China confiscated different crypto assets worth about $4 billion. The seized cryptocurrencies include Bitcoin (94, 775 BTC), Ethereum (833,083 ETH), Bitcoin Cash (79,581 BCH), EOS (27.6 million EOS), DASH (74,167 DASH), Dogecoin (6 billion DOGE), Litecoin (1.4 million LTC) and Tether (213,724 USDT).
China has already banned cryptocurrency in the country in order to curb illegal activities as crypto has an image of linkage with fraudulent actions. The law enforcement agencies took it very seriously and put forward immediate actions against the principal actors involved in the PlusToken Ponzi scheme.
PlusToken came as a potential project introduced by Chen Bo in 2018 and founders lured the early investors by collecting capital from the later investors. They hired an experienced social media team to get the attention of investors. The interested people in the crypto project submitted a total of $500 in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
In the period between 2018 and 2019, the fake platform had a user base of 2.5 million users and the total worth of funds was over $2.2 billion at the time.
In the court, it was revealed the founder Chen Bo used up the generated funds in purchasing expensive things, such as houses and cars. He even gave money to his relatives after collecting funds from investors. “The platform had no actual operations or functions. The accused used the digital assets for expenses including paying employees, and sold some of them to buy properties and luxury cars for themselves or relatives,” the court’s document states.
Besides imprisonment up to 11 years behind the bars, the Chinese courts also fined them between $18K (120,00 yuan) and $912,922 (6 million yuan).
The US regulators, such as the Department of Justice, are also making the circle short around people engaged in fraudulent crypto activities.
