Raees and Ameer Cajeer, 21 and 17 respectively, have not been heard from since April when their platform shut down and they told clients it had been hacked and funds were stolen. The brothers are alleged to have urged Africrypt’s investors not to contact the authorities as that “would only delay” effort to recover the money.
In the weeks before the disappearance, the brothers sold a Lamborghini Huracan, and gave up their permanent suite at one of South Africa’s most expensive hotels and their rented beachside apartment near Durban, lawyers for the investors say.
Gerhard Botha, a lawyer in Johannesburg, obtained a provisional liquidation order against the Cajees. The brothers claimed that they had been flown to China by Huobi, the world’s leading trading platform, who wanted to hear more about the returns Africrypt was getting.
“Investors were seeing investments rise quite dramatically, growth on their dashboard accounts between 8 and 12 per cent a month,” People were borrowing money to invest more and more,” Botha told.
The Times attempted to contact the Cajees without success. While few, if any, hacks of the coding system behind bitcoin have succeeded, the platforms where it is traded and the e-wallets where it is stored are seen as vulnerable.
In 2017 Ruja Ignatova, a self-styled “cryptoqueen”, disappeared with $4 billion in investors’ money after a scheme she had set up to rival bitcoin collapsed.
