After a lengthy investigation, Chinese police have arrested a total of 27 core members with direct links to the PlusToken scam that cost crypto users $5.8 billion.

in a report Today, Thursday, it was reported that Chinese police have arrested the core team behind the infamous PlusToken scam.

27 major PlusToken scammers arrested:

Although previous reports indicated that some PlusToken admins were arrested months ago, today’s report indicates that the 27 arrested were the core members of the fraud scheme, bringing the fraudulent project to an end.

Currently, Chinese law enforcement authorities have been investigating the project since it closed last year.

The hunt for the scammers continued for 12 months because the main members of the scheme were located in different parts of the world.

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According to the report, the special task force tasked with investigating the fraud visited countries such as Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and others, and cooperated with law enforcement authorities in various geographical regions to apprehend the 27 suspects.

The report also stated that police arrested 82 other members in connection with the fraud scheme.

The biggest scam in the crypto market:

PlusToken was a pyramid scheme that emerged in May 2018, describing itself as a crypto portfolio provider and investment program that pays investors high returns between 9% and 10% per month.

But in reality, it was nothing but a pyramid scheme similar to earlier notorious crypto scams such as BitConnect and OneCoin.

Most of the users of the scam scheme were from Korea and China, PlusToken closed its operations in 2019, and managed to steal billions of dollars in cryptocurrency from around 2 million people, ranging from local and international investors.

Previous reports from Chainalysis put the total loss caused by the PlusToken scheme at around $3 billion.

While today’s police report revealed that PlusToken victims lost about $5.8 billion, making the PlusToken project the biggest scam in the crypto market to date.

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The scammers transferred the stolen funds in batches between unknown wallets while also laundering some through their personal wallets and OTC trading platforms.

Last month, scammers moved over $240 million in Ethereum and EOS coins from official PlusToken wallets to unknown wallets.

In addition, Chainalysis has tracked over 800,000 ETH and 45,000 Bitcoins that were transferred to the scammers’ personal wallet addresses.

Positive development:

The arrest of the PlusToken core team is a welcome development in the crypto industry.

Hopefully, the same effort will be directed towards bringing down other fraudulent schemes such as OneCoin that stole $4 billion from investors.

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