In November 2020, Chinese authorities confiscated 194,775 bitcoins from the operators of the PlusToken Ponzi scheme. This amount of BTC was confiscated and placed in the state treasury, but it is currently unclear whether China still holds these bitcoins or has sold them.
On November 26, 2020, the final judgment document for the PlusToken Ponzi scam case, which shocked the global cryptocurrency industry, was published.
A man from Changsha, Hunan, with only a middle school education, raised 310,000 BTC; 9.17 million ETH; more than 51 million EOS, etc. Its model is a very simple Ponzi scheme + pyramid scheme, raising capital and promising interest, developing both upstream and downstream routes.
Most attention has been focused on the 190,000 bitcoin, 830,000 Ether, and 27.24 million EOS seized by police. Regarding the final disposition of this money, the court ruling document makes three statements:
First, part of the platform's digital currency was confiscated from defendants Tran Bac, Dinh Tan Kinh and Banh Duc Hien.
Second, the evidence in the case confirms that Chen Bo sought permission from the Yancheng Public Security Bureau to legally sell confiscated digital currencies through Beijing Chifan Technology Co., Ltd., with full The proceeds will be used to compensate for damages. The original court therefore recognized that Tran Bac had returned part of the money and reduced his sentence.
Third, the confiscated digital currencies were processed legally, with funds and profits confiscated and deposited into the state treasury.
The confiscated assets mainly include two parts: digital currencies raised by the platform and illegal profits obtained by the defendants.
Lawyer Huo Yijie told WuBlockchain that after a certain platform is recognized as a pyramid organization, usually only the organizers and leaders are criminally prosecuted, constituting an organized crime and pyramid leadership. In judicial practice, other members are often not recognized as criminal victims. Therefore, illegal earnings are confiscated and paid to the state treasury.
Here, the famous Beijing Chi Pham Technology Co., Ltd. appears. The company's investors include Huobi co-founder Yuan Dawei, Coldlar Wallet's Yuan Dawei, and prominent crypto investor and Binance shareholder Chen Weixing.
Chi Pham Company is compared to the famous American organization Chainalysis, which mainly provides technical services to the government on blockchain and cryptocurrency management and is currently raising $100 million at a valuation of 1 billion dollars. Similarly, Chi Pham Company is said to have achieved cooperation with police agencies in more than a dozen provinces and cities across the country since the beginning of 2019, with more than 30 specific cases including popular currencies like BTC and ETH, involving tens of billions of yuan.
Both Jiang Zhuoer and WuBlockchain received similar information, confirming through communication with multiple OTC merchants that a large portion of these coins were sold from late 2019 to mid-2020 when BTC was priced from $7,000 to $12,000. The phrase “money and profits legally confiscated and paid into the state treasury” in the ruling document partly confirms this statement.
According to Document No. 228 of the Ministry of Finance and Economy in 1986: Income confiscated by the Administration of Industry and Commerce, Department of Public Security, People's Procuracy, People's Court and regulatory agencies Local state economic processing or sentencing are paid into local finances. Yancheng's local Finance Department may have had significant revenue. This may also be the driving force behind Yancheng's crackdown on the industry. Refer to previous crackdowns on PlusToken and miners to understand why the Yancheng police cracked down heavily on cryptocurrencies.
Overseas, addresses holding PlusToken are always highly followed and discussed. Popular trader light also claimed that funds from PlusToken flowed to Huobi in 2019 (after being arrested), and now appear to have been sold.
However, media and KOLs monitoring overseas addresses believe that the majority of the bitcoins were sold through Huobi, but there appears to be 15,000 BTC left unsold; Additionally, overseas analysts believe that ETH addresses are still inactive.
According to WuBlockchain's comprehensive judgment, the addresses monitored by the police do not completely match the addresses monitored abroad, and there are also addresses that the police are continuing to monitor. The document also emphasizes: the illegal profits that have not been returned from the defendants' relatives and the unreturned monies and profits of each defendant will continue to be recovered by the Yancheng Police Department and paid into the state treasury.
According to the document, police verified that the platform held 310,000 bitcoins; 9.17 million Ether; more than 51 million EOS, etc., and recovered 190,000 bitcoin, 830,000 Ether, and 27.24 million EOS, etc.
If this amount is sold one day, it will be no less than the recent Mt.Gox payout.
