- The Cajee brothers are the subjects of an international manhunt after conflicting reports over their whereabouts
- The pair fled South Africa when their Africrypt investment firm collapsed
- The Cajee brothers could have taken almost $3 billion in investments since 2019
An international manhunt is underway for the Cajee brothers, the South African founders of the Africrypt investment scheme said to have lost its investors hundreds of millions of dollars. Conflicting reports on the whereabouts of the pair, 21-year-old Raees and 18-year-old Ameer, have led to confusion over where the pair actually are amid suggestions that they planned their escape as far back as October last year. A blockchain forensics company has also been hired to help trace the flow of funds into and out of the platform in an attempt to find out what really happened to the money.
Africrypt Died And Took Investor Funds With It
Africrypt claimed to be a wildly successful cryptocurrency investment platform in which investors would send funds for the Cajee brothers to trade. The platform surged in popularity in 2020 as word spread of the huge gains being made, but in 2021 a familiar pattern began to emerge – there were problems with withdrawals, then communications stalled, and finally the platform collapsed, taking investor funds with it.
The Cajee brothers blamed a hack for the loss of funds, although they said that this only lost them $5 million worth of investments. They have since been on the run after allegedly receiving death threats, with no one able to locate them. A Guardian report suggested that the pair had bought Vanuatuan passports in late 2020, but the affidavit Raees signed on July 19 to reaffirm that only $6 million worth was stolen in the hack was done so from Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania. The pair are opposing the liquidation order filed by the former investors which is due to be ruled on in September.
Blockchain Analysis Firm Investigates Fund Flow
With regard to the actual funds, South African firm Crypto Investigation Bureau has been brought on board to hunt down the missing cryptocurrency, and the initial reports coming out of the company are pouring cold water on the Cajee brothers’ hack story according to CEO Hamilton Cheong:
If this is true, the hackers would have broken through several security layers in a matter of minutes to get to the crypto, and that is extremely unlikely. We don’t think this was a hack. One reason we say this is that four months before the alleged hack, funds were being depleted out of wallets under the control of Africrypt.
Cheong has also rubbished suggestions from the Cajee brothers that the sums involved were much smaller than investors suggest, stating that once the transactions from all wallets are calculated the actual sum invested could be a staggering $2.9 billion.
