Image: Daily Mail
Faizel Patel – 28/06/2021
The deputy-editor of Business Insider South Africa says South African brothers, Raees and Ameer Cajee have skipped the country with an estimated R51 billion in bitcoin from their cryptocurrency investment platform Africrypt.
Phillip de Wet was speaking to Radio Islam about Raeez and Ameer’s crypto investment scam .
Africrypt Cryptocurrency Investments was founded in 2019 by the brothers and promised returns of around 10% per month.
In April 2021, they claimed Africrypt was hacked and all its Bitcoin holdings were stolen.
While Investors were informed that client wallets and nodes were all compromised and that Africrypt was halting operations, clients were also discouraged from instituting legal proceedings as it would delay the process to get the money back.
Speaking to Radio Islam, de Wet says Raees and Ameer’s family believe the brothers left the country.
“The question in everyone’s mind now is whether this was what is called an ‘exit scam’ where you kind of taken people’s money and investments and then you just hot-footed, you runaway. Or, whether these two kids were genuinely hacked, saw all this money disappear, thought ‘tjoh’ we’re in deep trouble here and realised that there would be some vengeful people after them and ran away without the money.”
De Wet says Raees and Ameer have made contact with their lawyer saying that the money was indeed stolen, but people involved in the recovery process looking at the circumstantial evidence say the brothers are criminals who ran away with people’s money.”
Asked about why would clients invest huge sums of money with two young “kids”, De Wet says this is question that boggles the mind.
“Raees Cajee especially is described by people who know him as quite a whiz kid. He was involved in bitcoin mining early they say. It was clear that he knew his stuff and it’s quite possible that he himself made quite significant amounts of money in that way. It does look like they had a slick story to tell. They managed to convince friend and family to invest initially.”
De Wet says according to some of the lawyers who are trying to recover the money, it remains unclear how could billions in Bitcoin flow into a “this quite obscure little operation.”
Listen to the interview with Phillip de Wet
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