Africrypt, a South African cryptocurrency investment platform founded in 2019 by brothers Raees Cajee and Ameer Cajee, collapsed in April 2021 after the founders claimed a hack had drained investor wallets and then instructed clients not to report the incident to authorities — a step they framed as protecting an ongoing recovery effort. Within days of that announcement, both brothers were unreachable. Client funds were gone.
The collapse attracted global attention primarily because of a headline figure: early reports, including a widely cited Bloomberg article from June 2021, placed losses at $3.6 billion, a figure derived from the claimed Bitcoin holdings at peak valuations. That number has not been verified by any regulatory body or court-appointed investigator. The Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA), South Africa’s markets regulator, estimated investor losses at approximately R200 million (around $12–15 million at 2021 exchange rates) based on formal complaints received. Court-appointed liquidators working from documented fund flows put the credible upper bound at roughly $223 million. Independent analysts have cited a $40–50 million range as the most supportable estimate given available records. The gap between $3.6 billion and verified figures is substantial; this entry uses the FSCA and liquidator ranges and notes the discrepancy.
As of early 2026, Raees and Ameer Cajee had returned to South Africa from their years abroad and were reported to be residing inside a gated estate in KwaZulu-Natal. No formal criminal charges had been filed in South Africa. One brother was arrested in Zurich, Switzerland in November 2021 and later released on bail to supervised residence. South African authorities have not effected a domestic arrest, and lawyers for investors reported difficulty serving legal papers as of early 2026.
FCoin, a Chinese cryptocurrency exchange founded in May 2018 by Zhang Jian, a former chief technology officer of Huobi, permanently closed on February 17, 2020, after Zhang publicly announced that the exchange had accumulated a deficit of between 7,000 and 13,000 Bitcoin — worth up to $130 million at prevailing prices — which it was unable to cover. Zhang attributed the deficit to compounding errors in FCoin’s signature innovation, a “transaction-fee mining” reward model, combined with treasury management failures and an undisclosed buyback programme for the exchange’s native token. The platform did not suffer a hack, and Zhang did not immediately flee in the manner of a conventional exit-scam operator; he published an extended written explanation and stated his intention to use proceeds from future ventures to repay users. He then became effectively unreachable.
Users were paid nothing. Blockchain researchers at AnChain.AI reported in February 2020 that funds had been moved from FCoin’s cold wallets to unknown accounts in the days before the closure announcement, raising the question of whether the deficit narrative was genuine insolvency or a cover for a planned exit. Chinese authorities investigated but no formal criminal charges against Zhang have been publicly confirmed in Chinese or international legal records as of this writing. Zhang’s whereabouts and legal status remain undisclosed.
FCoin occupies an unusual position in the taxonomy of crypto custody failures: it sits in the contested territory between catastrophic negligence and deliberate fraud. The factual record supports both readings. This entry presents the documented facts and notes where the record is genuinely ambiguous.
Cryptsy, a Florida-based cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2013 by Paul Vernon — known by his forum handle “Big Vern” — collapsed in January 2016 after Vernon secretly drained the exchange’s cryptocurrency reserves, abandoned his Florida home, and relocated to China. The theft he concealed had begun more than eighteen months earlier: on July 29, 2014, Vernon claimed hackers had stolen 13,000 Bitcoin and 300,000 Litecoin from Cryptsy’s hot wallets. He disclosed nothing to users and continued operating the exchange, covering the resulting shortfall with incoming deposits in a manner consistent with a Ponzi scheme. By the time he shut the exchange down via a mass email to users on January 13, 2016, at least $6.6 million in customer cryptocurrency was confirmed missing, and Vernon was already abroad.
A class-action lawsuit filed the same day as the closure by attorney David Silver resulted in U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra appointing receiver Jim Sallah in April 2016 to administer what remained of Cryptsy’s assets. On July 27, 2017, Judge Marra entered a default civil judgment — case number 9:16-cv-80060, Southern District of Florida — finding Paul Vernon liable to the plaintiff class in the principal sum of $8,200,000. The court simultaneously declared that the 11,325.0961 Bitcoin stolen from customers on July 29, 2014, constituted property of the plaintiff class subject to the judgment. Vernon did not appear, did not respond to the complaint, and did not make any payment toward the judgment. As of the date of this report, he remains believed to be in the Liaoning province of China, where he has no credible extradition exposure under existing treaty arrangements between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.
The customers who lost funds were predominantly early cryptocurrency adopters and traders who had deposited Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other altcoins into an exchange that processed significant daily volume across hundreds of listed trading pairs. The receiver’s efforts to recover assets were hampered by the absence of documentation of where customer funds had gone, and the $8.2 million judgment has never been enforced.
Bitsane, a Dublin-registered cryptocurrency exchange that had been operating since 2016, vanished on June 17, 2019. Its website went offline, its Twitter and Facebook accounts were deleted, and emails to support addresses began bouncing as undeliverable. The platform had counted 246,000 registered users and a daily trading volume of approximately $7 million as recently as March 31, 2019. Neither the named CEO, Aidas Rupsys, nor the named CTO, Dmitry Prudnikov, responded to press inquiries, appeared before any regulatory authority, or made any public statement explaining the closure. The operators have not been publicly located, charged, or identified through any confirmed legal proceeding as of the date of this report.
The disappearance followed a pattern that had become familiar in the 2019 period of exchange failures: withdrawal failures that began weeks before the final closure, support communications that cited unspecified technical reasons, and a terminal event in which all public-facing infrastructure was simultaneously deleted. Users who had held cryptocurrency on the platform — primarily XRP, Bitcoin, and other digital assets — found their balances inaccessible with no recourse pathway. The exchange had gained particular prominence as an early trading venue for XRP (Ripple), having at one point been listed as one of Ripple’s approved exchanges, and a significant portion of the affected user base held XRP positions.
Individual losses documented in reporting ranged from several thousand dollars to a single documented case of $150,000 in XRP and Bitcoin held by one US-resident user. The aggregate dollar loss is not established in any public regulatory or court filing; estimates reported at the time ranged widely. The case remains unresolved: no criminal charges have been filed, no assets have been frozen by Irish or European regulators, and no recovery mechanism has been established for affected users.
MapleChange, a small Canadian cryptocurrency exchange that had launched in May 2018, announced on October 28, 2018 that it had suffered a hack in which all funds were drained from its hot wallets. The same day, the exchange deleted its Twitter account, its Discord server, its Telegram channel, and its website. The reported loss was 913 Bitcoin — approximately $5.9 million at the time — which the exchange attributed to a bug that allowed users to exploit the withdrawal system. No verifiable evidence of an external hack was ever produced. The exchange’s operators were never publicly identified through any confirmed name or legal proceeding, and no charges have been filed in connection with the incident.
The sequence of events on October 28 — hack announcement followed within hours by simultaneous deletion of every public-facing channel — was widely characterised by security researchers and the crypto press as an exit scam executed under the cover of a fabricated security incident. The anonymous internet investigation that followed the deletion identified an individual suspected to be behind the exchange, but no law enforcement body has publicly confirmed or acted on that identification. Approximately five months of operations and 913 Bitcoin in customer deposits were the total scope of the exchange’s existence.
The users who lost funds at MapleChange were cryptocurrency traders who had deposited Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other altcoins into a platform that had listed 62 trading pairs and was in the process of building a user base. Many had modest balances; some had more significant positions. The exchange had been in operation for only five months, had no known regulatory registration, no published team information, and no audited financial records.
Coinroom, one of Poland’s most active retail cryptocurrency exchanges, executed an exit scam on April 2, 2019, notifying users via a brief email that the platform was terminating all contracts and that customers had approximately 24 hours to withdraw their holdings. Customers who did not act — or who tried and found their withdrawals blocked — lost deposits ranging from PLN 300 ($79) to PLN 60,000 ($15,660). Seconds after the deadline passed, the exchange’s website went dark, its phone lines went silent, and all social media accounts were deleted. The company’s director, Tomasz Zbigniew Wiewior, disappeared. Polish prosecutors opened a criminal investigation, but as of available reporting, no arrest or conviction of Wiewior has been publicly confirmed.
The exchange had been registered in 2016 and began operating its trading platform in 2017, offering Polish retail users a straightforward fiat-to-crypto on-ramp with PLN pairs for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other major cryptocurrencies. It carried no regulatory oversight, operated without any mandatory capital reserve requirement, and maintained no deposit protection mechanism. Its user base was predominantly Polish, composed largely of retail investors making first or second cryptocurrency purchases, many of whom held balances equivalent to weeks or months of savings.
The April 2019 exit was not spontaneous. The sequence of preparation required — deleting social media profiles, disabling the website, shutting down telephone lines, and creating the infrastructure for Wiewior to leave the jurisdiction — constitutes coordinated pre-planning. Reporting from Polish financial publication Money.pl and others indicated that Wiewior was alleged to have established a company in Estonia prior to the closure, suggesting advance preparation for departure. No public charges have been filed against Wiewior in available reporting as of the time of this dossier, and no assets have been returned to depositors.