- The PlusToken scammers have moved 789,534 just before Ethereum dropped over 5%
- Move echoes similar behaviour which has led to market dumps
- $200 million in ETH, XRP, and EOS all moved in 24 hours
The PlusToken scammers could be condemning Ethereum to a short term price crash after moving 789,534 out of its wallet. The Chinese Ponzi scheme, which pulled in a staggering 6.4 million ETH alongside 180,000 BTC, hasn’t sent the ETH direct to an exchange, but it is clearly only a matter of time before they continue to liquidate more of the proceeds of their crimes.
$200 Million Multi-token Move
News of the PlusToken ETH move came through the Whale Alert signalling system and is part of a huge $200 million series of ETH,EOS, and XRP moves:
🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 789,534 #ETH (187,847,558 USD) transferred from PlusToken to unknown wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) June 24, 2020
The ETH, worth some $188 million at the time, is not the first such move the scammers have made with the second biggest cryptocurrency – in December 2019 they moved an almost identical 789,525 ETH from their known wallet to an unknown wallet shortly before a price crash.
PlusToken are known to have used exchanges like Huobi in the past, and their use of an unmarked wallet to send to on previous occasions may mean that they are cashing out via an OTC method or sending it to a mixing service, although the tokens often end up with exchanges in the end:
— Thomas Silkjær (@Silkjaer) June 22, 2020
PlusToken Sales Often Precede Price Crashes
PlusToken were thought to have been instrumental in a number of large scale Bitcoin selloffs since 2019, including a 12% drop in early march.
The scam, thought to originate in China, raked in an incredible $3 billion worth of investments in 2018, and since the arrest of its founders and many of its operators in 2019, the huge fund pool has been cashed out in huge chunks. Consequently, the price of Ethereum has dropped 5% in 24 hours, although this is more likely to be due to Bitcoin dropping and taking Ethereum with it, suggesting that the PlusToken ETH is still waiting to be sold…
