Independent analysts have refuted recent social media posts claiming that “hundreds of dormant wallets” linked to the multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency scam Token Plus have begun moving nearly $2 billion worth of Ether.
In a now-deleted post published on August 6, blockchain analytics service Lookonchain claimed that around 789,533 ETH (equivalent to $1.8 billion at current prices) began moving from wallets linked to TokenPlus.
In fact, the amount may have been much less than initially stated.
A follow-up investigation by Chinese cryptocurrency data account EmberCN claims that Lookonchain’s original post was inaccurate, stating that most of the ETH had already been sold in 2021.
EmberCN wrote in a post on X on August 7 that “the vast majority” of the 789,500 ETH mentioned by Lookonchain had already been transferred to Bidesk, a cryptocurrency exchange based in the British Virgin Islands, between June and September 2021.
EmberCN tracked “approximately a dozen addresses” linked to Plus Token and concluded that only about 25,757 ETH (equivalent to about $63.1 million) had actually been transferred in the past 24 hours.
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Lookonchain has since deleted the original post and has yet to issue an official clarification or retraction of the original information.
Arkham Intelligence, a blockchain analytics platform, also posted to X regarding the movement of ETH transfers linked to PlusToken, claiming that $450 million worth of ETH was moving from wallets linked to Token Plus.
However, a closer look at the data shared by Arkham shows that there has been very little movement from the main Token Plus wallet, with only around $12 million in ETH transferred over the last 12 hours.
Cointelegraph reached out to Arcam Intelligence but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Plus Token is a Chinese cryptocurrency wallet app that operated between 2018 and 2019 and is one of the largest cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes in history. Investigators found that investors were scammed out of up to $2.9 billion.
In July 2019, Chinese police detained six people involved in the Plus Token project in Vanuatu and extradited them to mainland China for criminal prosecution.
According to local media reports in 2020, an individual named Zhou, one of the key figures of the Plus Token project, is facing criminal charges in China.
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