Currently trading around $10,000, Bitcoin lost 18% of its value this week, wreaking havoc in the cryptocurrency market.

Though a drop has been long expected because of the sharp rise of BTC price and the gaps created by CME Group's Bitcoin futures contracts, a prominent reason could be large amounts of BTC dumped in the market.

On August 14, Dovey Wan, a founding partner at blockchain-based investment company Primitive Ventures brought CT’s attention to the massive sell-off by the Ponzi scheme, dubbed PlusToken.

PlusToken Scammed $3 Billion from People

Recently, Wan wrote how since September 2017, China has been “progressively restricting” cryptocurrencies in the country and prosecute crypto scams and

“seriously offending ICOs.”

PlusTokens was not only among the projects that were scamming their customers but also the largest one that scammed a whopping $3 billion — including ~70K in BTC + ~ 800K in ETH. Core team members of the project were arrested earlier this year in Vanuatu and are now facing decades in jail time.

Most recently, a report by Blockchain security firm CipherTrace brought PlusToken Scheme in the limelight.

Started in mid-2018, PlusToken offered “high yield investment return.” It has 4 layers of membership structure with each one giving a different percentage of rebate.

Massive Sell-off Started in early July

Wan said, in early 2019, PlusToken claimed its membership has over 10 million.

The addresses shared by her are however only the known ones while as per the police report $3 billion were the total scammed amount.

Many of these BTC addresses, she says, started with P2SH — commonly used for multi-sig. Wan says it is likely some people who hold the keys are not caught by the police.

But now the scammed cryptocurrency is crawling back.

This actually started around early July as shared by a security audit firm Peckshield. The firm revealed a total of approximately a thousand were moved to Bittrex and Huobi.

Chinese traders have also been reportedly climbing that an unknown address has been dumping 100 BTC on cryptocurrency exchanges, that Wan connected to PlusToken scheme.

This could be a reason why first in July BTC/USD dropped to $9,150 and now yet again to $9,470 level.

Source: Coin360.com