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https://beincrypto.com/a-mysterious-3b-chinese-ponzi-scheme-is-being-blamed-for-bitcoins-price-collapse/

A Mysterious $3B Chinese Ponzi Scheme Is Being Blamed for Bitcoin’s Price Collapse

This will crash the Bitcoin market when these will be for sell! Huge amount of Bitcoin to be dumped soon.

Did they successfully sold the 1000BTC to Bittrex and Huobi?

74,000 BTC and another 95,000 BTC to their wallets. This scheme is pretty big but how come people here in the forum didn't talk about this PLUS token? I haven't really encounter a thread about them here in the forum.

where is the evidence of any of this?


smells of a last ditch attempt at manipulating the market downwards before a break upwards

As it says in the article, several factors have kept this news under the radars, like the fact it happens in China, and crypto exchanges are illegal there.
But this article is from Today, it won't take long before it spreads and we will know more soon.

That's strange why would they partly sold some of the BTC in a U.S. based crypto exchange? Selling BTC in Bittrex could only mean that there is at least a person operating the scam in U.S. soil. I could understand why some of the cryptocurrencies are sole in Huobi since the scam originated in China but why would they sell some in Bittrex? Or did they just made themselves an easy target for the authorities since now they have involved a foreign based crypto exchange to their mode of escape because I'm pretty sure moving that huge amounts of crypto would require some KYC in both exchanges.

Same at Zero Hedge
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-15/bitcoin-back-below-10k-3-billion-china-ponzi-allegedly-dumps-crypto

That amount a bitcoin omg. I think something else behind of it. Think that 70.000,00 BTC how is it possible?
And if it is true again we are seeing crowdfunding is can create cathastrophic effect.
twitter link:
https://twitter.com/DoveyWan/status/1161686134314848256 (https://twitter.com/DoveyWan/status/1161686134314848256)

Scammer adresses:
14BWH6GmVoL5nTwbVxQJKJDtzv4y5EbTVm (95228 $BTC)
31odn4bxF2TgM4pD7m4hdSr1vGMsjh9ugV (68,562 $BTC)
33FKcwFhFBKWHh46Ksmxs3QBu8HV7h8QdF (37,922 $BTC)
eospstotoken (26,312,329 $EOS)
0xF4a2eFf88a408ff4c4550148151c33c93442619e (789,525 $ETH)

that is "evidence" that anyone can present. i.e. not evidence of this story

those addresses are publicly available, you're foolish to believe randomers on a social media platform

@Carlton Banks. Dovey Wan is not a randomer.

Dovey Wan is a partner at Primitive Ventures, a crypto asset investment fund, and a member of CoinDesk’s advisory board.

Source https://www.coindesk.com/cryptocurrency-in-china-over-the-counter-under-the-table

There is no reason for her to make up this story.

yes there is

Did bitcoin price collapse? I don't see that, bitcoin dump a bit but were able to come back now.

According to the news, that's only $3B and it was not sold one time, it has been transferred from different holders and different wallets.
With the trading volume of BTC which is over $20B daily, it could only less likely effect on the BTC price.

The MMM Ponzi scheme is one of the largest Ponzi schemes that I know about and in some countries people use Bitcoin to do the payments. A lot of these schemes fail and the immediate backlash is that people are blaming Bitcoin and not the Ponzi scheme for their losses. The media reports all point to a Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, but the fact is that it was only used as a payment option.

We have seen this with a lot of Ponzi schemes lately, because Bitcoin transactions is pseudo anonymous and the people behind these bitcoins can quickly move those coins over the border, without some third party getting involved. <Banks can froze accounts, but Bitcoin addresses cannot be frozen>  ;)

Yes, this is the problem. When a scam is using the US Dollar as medium of payment, the media will not be reporting that scam as US Dollar scam but with those using Bitcoin the report will most likely smear the good name of Bitcoin. Seems to me that the media has not yet fully understand the whole Bitcoin thing.

Anyway, with the Plus Token ponzi scam, millions are victimized and huge cryptocurrencies were amassed as the result. Sadly, even authorities could not do to stop the assets from being laundered using many ways and means. I am just glad that I am not one of the many participants of this scheme and scam.

Unfortunately, this is not going to be the last of this nature as more and more people can easily be nudge to release their hard-earned money for the promise of greater returns. As long as we are greedy, there will always be greedier people who can get into us sometime.

This is classic manipulation of news. Great timing.

People sell out of fear because they believe these scammers will dump their bags. What happens is that the panic sellers are crashing the price, but as stupid as people are, they believe that the price is going down because these scammers are selling. One way to look at this positively is that weak hands are eliminating themselves.  :D

How many times have we seen this happen before? Come one people. If it's too difficult to handle then this place isn't for you.

exactly

want to exploit a natural downtick in BTC price? why not save up some bad news stories, dump them on news websites when the market dips, then buy the dip when people panic sell

 

and there's no proof (in this case) that any scammers are doing this, or that they even have bags to dump.


anyone helping to prop up unfounded stories that move the market should be viewed with suspicion (at a minimum, they're dishonestly riding the waves of these manipulative stories, hoping to pick up cheap BTC before the correction upwards, anyone can do this without actually being a part of the original rumour)

that includes news websites "simply reporting bare facts" as well as individuals doing the same. If you want to report this sort of thing, it's important to emphasize that there's scant or no evidence, and that it's a possible attempt to manipulate the price short term

Totally right. If people think logically, an exchange would have put a stop to this selling if it was actually going on because they won't allow scammers to empty their order books.

People remember the 5000BTC dump on Bitstamp not that long ago? The exchange started an investigation because it left a massive impact on their order book. This is was a legit market sale and got the exchange triggered. Imagine what happens when scammers are dumping. Exchanges would not allow this activity to take place.

On top of that, selling such a large number of coins means that you have verified yourself, and thus the exchange has all the information it needs about you. Do you think scammers will verify themselves after stealing an insane amount of coins? ::)

Plus token and Cloud token are mentioned several times in the forum, you just did not notice any of them. Both tokens are more than obvious ponzi / scam projects, and what to say about people who invest in such projects? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5158024.0

I think that this ponzi has nothing to do with recent dump, this would happen no matter what happened or not. Whom to blame for all the previous downs in last 2-3 months? If anyone is to be blamed for this time, why not Binance (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5175727.msg52176106#msg52176106) system upgrade two days ago.

Lols, here it what the guy claims:


So,
1Dd5VTCkRtMG8bpuHZrjkLf1TeZ8cwZGDe (https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1Dd5VTCkRtMG8bpuHZrjkLf1TeZ8cwZGDe) was first used in 2015
I somehow doubt the scammers used a 4 years old address to launder their money

Also,  14BWH6GmVoL5nTwbVxQJKJDtzv4y5EbTVm was emptied in May (3 months ago)

Oh ..the horror!!! Somebody think oh the chi price

Let's pick some random addresses with large amounts and if the coins move let's run to the hills screaming!



A blogger and a partner at an investment fund with 2-10 employees.
Definition of that...nobody!

That's makes sense. People have repeatedly pointed at dozens and dozens of 100BTC sales on Binance, which would take an awful lot of time to withdraw with a limit of only 2BTC per day.

It requires level 2 verification to withdraw 100BTC per day, which still means that it would take a long time to empty your Binance account. With how active CZ is on social media, he would have singlehandedly whooped them.

The 100BTC sales are very likely whales selling into their own buy orders to get their volume count up (higher volume = lower trading fees). People need to stop believing news outlets.

Got to credit the fact that these guys used just enough evidence (as Carlton points out, evidence of something happening is not evidence of linkage) to resemble credibility and create just enough hype. Didn't last, and wouldn't last even if it were true.

Also, I'm somewhat from the industry myself, as a freelancer, but I don't mind saying that you should always be aware of people with that kind of corporate reputation. Doesn't take much more than business sense to become an advisor in certain circles.

Seems like a pretty suspicious article. It's a Chinese ponzi, so I'd doubt that a lot of the transactions were made in BTC (due to China's banning against the cryptocurrency.

Everyone acting way too gullible here, just because a random news site makes an article supposedly explaining the crash of BTC, doesn't mean it's true. Just because they had 2 addresses with BTC in it, doesn't mean those 2 addresses belonged to them. Anyone could show anyone those addresses and say they are BTC millionaires.

Just more manipulation of the news, bad articles about BTC means weak hands will sell their coins and dump the market even more. I'm still waiting for any actual proof before I'll believe this.

The amount scammed is just insane. 200,000 BTC and 800,000 ETH would amount to $2.5 billion as per the latest exchange rates.I don't understand why people pour their hard earned money in to these tokens and ICOs, despite the bad experience they had in 2018. I never thought scammers can be this successful. The largest scams that I have heard of involved a few hundreds of millions of USD worth of coins (mostly Ethereum). And this is bad news for Binance as well. Now the authorities have another excuse to make KYC mandatory for the Binance users (I am talking about the global users, and not about the users from the United States).

I think that it is fake news.
There is nothing posted for this Scam and as they managed to steal so big amounts of money it would be noted somewhere. I didn't even hear about this token. I don't think that this is to blame the drop in Bitcoin price. It is more like a correction to the recent uptend.

Exactly mate nothing reason to panic about this issue, without any proof of evidence, and it's obvious people hp ehund they want to holder sell their coins quick to manipulate the price the market price.

If it is not a Chinese ponzi moving all those coins, then who? A rich investor? All bitcoin addresses of his are now marked, no more financial privacy for him hehehe.

In any case, Chainalysis launched a real time alert service for 15 coins. It might be helpful for suspicious transactions, however, it might also be used for blacklisting wallets.



Blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis has introduced "suspicious cryptocurrency transaction alerts" in "Chainalysis Know Your Transaction (KYT)", its "real-time anti-money laundering (AML) compliance solution".

According to Chainalysis, this new feature results in alerts being generated "whenever a transfer involves a risky counterparty and crosses a value threshold." Alert levels (Severe, High, Medium, and Low) are "based on factors such as category, service, direct versus indirect exposure, direction of funds, and amount," and are available for all 15 cryptocurrencies that Chainalysis supports (including BTC, ETH, BCH, LTC, USDT, and DAI).

Michael Breu, Gemini's Chief Compliance Officer, also chose to comment on this announcement:

As a New York Trust company we are required to monitor transactions on and off our platform. Tools like KYT alerts, which provide real time and ongoing blockchain analysis, coupled with Gemini's own compliance policies, help us meet our regulatory obligations.

Read in full https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2019/08/chainalysis-launches-real-time-suspicious-transaction-alerts-for-15-cryptocurrencies/

No, this is true and many articles about this were shared across telegram and twitter. There are also pictures of the perpetrators and one them looks like an Asian version of vitalik. But it seems like the exchanges were alerted about this and monitor the wallets of those scammers which has prevented the big dump of bitcoin.

As per Elementus, more than 50% of the scammed amount was withdrawn using China-based Huobi. Other exchanges such as ZB, Upbit, Gate and OKEx were also used. Multiple cryptocurrencies are involved in this scandal (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple.etc) and this makes tracking the stolen amount a very tedious and complicated task. But the amount stolen was huge and therefore a lot of the individuals and firms are keeping track on the movements.

And it won't be very easy for the law enforcement authorities to seize the stolen coins. According to Dovey Wan, the Bitcoins are being held in multi-sig wallets and the cops won't be able to secure the BTC unless they capture all those who are involved. Seizing the ETH and XRP coins should be easier, but till now the authorities didn't had any luck with that as well.

looks like after all this could be one of the contributing factors to the recent crash
I didn't pay much attention to the news in August , but when I saw people dump coins  at the highest bidder price , I instantly recalled this topic
maybe some of the coins did end up on the markets , the total volumes that day were not insane but pretty high for some exchanges over 70.000 coins traded hands
but if even 1/10th of the reported coins were laundered and sold , this would explain the sudden 2000$ price drop

Imagine blaming a completely irrelevant (and not even sizable) scam for BTC's price movements.

Short and long term cycles within the market, as well as other factors are much more likely to cause these price movements. The market has sufficient liquidity to soak up these 50-100 BTC trades quite easily. If you look at the volume, you will quickly realise this as well.

These articles are written up most likely for attention, or sensationalist headlines. Price movements are not determined by a single event, ever, period.

I don't think that it is irrelevant. The total market cap of cryptocurrency is around $220 billion (the net worth of coins in free-float would be much lower), and the amount mentioned here represents almost 1.5% of that amount. And this is from a single scam. The real extent of the PLUS Token scam is still unknown. I have read reports claiming more than 10 million individuals scammed (most of them in China and South Korea). Last month, CipherTrace released a statement claiming that the real losses from this scam may be much higher than $3 billion. They also claimed that a lot of this stolen money is being dumped on various crypto-exchanges (which explains the recent bearish price movement).