A giant transaction associated with the PlusToken ponzi scheme worried traders this week, with $105 million worth of Etherium being transferred to an unknown wallet.
Data from Twitter account Whale Alert, which monitors and identifies large movements of cryptocurrency, showed a single movement of 789,525 ETH ($105.1 million) between a known PlusToken wallet and an unknown recipient on Thursday. This worried a lot of traders, and increased selling pressure amongst them.
PlusToken, if you’re unaware, hit a high of near $350 before crashing, and is now considered one of the biggest scams and ponzi schemes ever, with many people involved with the scam seemingly “disappearing”. Whilst it was active, they received an estimated $3 billion in Bitcoin (BTC) and ETH from investors purchasing PlusToken coins.
“Despite several arrests, activity has shown one or more individuals still have access to the scheme’s wallets,” said news outlet CoinTelegraph.
“Heads up,” a Twitter user said, in relation to the big move of assets.
Many people, and reports published suspect that scammers are using over the counter services to change the cryptocurrency into fiat currency, evidently driving the price down, as we’ve seem recently.
The exchange Huobi’s OTC service is suspected to be heavily used by scammers.
“Unfortunately, because it’s not possible to distinguish between trades made by OTC brokers in possession of PlusToken funds and all other trades made on Huobi, we can’t say for sure that PlusToken cashouts caused Bitcoin’s price to drop,” the reports stated.
Researchers at Chainalysis concluded:
“We can say that those cashouts cause increased volatility in Bitcoin’s price, and that they correlate significantly with Bitcoin price drops.”
