Do you remember what happened to the price of bitcoin when the founders of Plus Token were arrested? Yes, it started to dump from its local top of approximately USD 14,000.
Now we have other arrests of another fraudulent investment scheme – the BitCloud network. These arrests happened couple of days ago, and people are scared that the price of bitcoin could dump further right now.
This week didn’t look all too good for crypto overall. Tether burned about USD 220 million, and that money is leaving the market and is not investing any time soon. As far as XRP adoption is concerned, we’ve had weird news from Japan that we’ll discuss shortly as well.
The Alleged Ponzi Schemes
As mentioned above, when the six founders of the Plus Token scam were arrested, the price of bitcoin started to dump. We can also track on the blockchain that some of the funds of the Plus Token scam are still moving around, and most probably aren’t getting dumped, even after mixing. This was actually a $2.9 billion scam!
Why was this not really known in the western hemisphere? That’s quite simple – because it was a scam out of China.
There are actually way more sophisticated schemes out there, and BitCloud network used to be one of them. BitCloud may be doing something good for bitcoin in the beginning, but perhaps at some point, the founders decided that they needed bigger payments. So they stopped increasing the hash rate, although new people were coming in. Then in early 2018, we started to realize that something about it doesn’t sound so true, after which many people stopped investing in it. Something was shady at some point, although it the very beginning it looked quite legit.
Three men got arrested on December 10, 2019, in connection with a crypto mining scheme. The fraud amounted to USD 722 million. Since this amount, when compared to $2.9 billion, is still quite a bear, let’s hope that the price of bitcoin is not going to dump further. It already doesn’t feel good to be on the bitcoin or cryptocurrency ride in general right now.
But the bad news doesn’t just stop there. There’s actually more..
The Tether Story
USD 220 million worth of Tether got burned. Burning Tether means that some people actually cashed out, which means they took their dollars for USDT. This implies that all that money left the ecosystem or the crypto space, be it bitcoins or altcoins. This is not exactly bullish.
The XRP Adoption
There has been massive adoption for XRP in Japan over the past few years. But 4 days ago, we saw a headline that said, “Money laundering battle drives Japan banks to JPMorgan’s network”. This is definitely not good and is in fact a bummer for all the XRP holders.
What can we learn from all this?
First of all, scams can be way more sophisticated than you might think. Secondly, legit companies can also turn into scams at times. We have seen the BitCloud founders with the very important people in the mining space. They even had hash power. Yet they turned into a straight out scam. Maybe they were fraudulent from the very beginning, or maybe not – who knows?
We need to be aware and cautious of the fraudsters out there, who could plan out a fraudulent or ponzi scheme with a very nice-looking cover-up, be it in the form of a so-called media company, a publication site, a fake crypto exchange address, or their claims to be ‘partners’ with some of the crucial people in the crypto space. It is hard to point out the fake from the legit, but sooner or later the signs of shadiness start showing up.