The appeal of crypto has grown, the latest cryptocurrency news show. This has presented a lot of opportunities for scammers to part naive investors from their money. This year has been no exception as many cryptocurrency and blockchain experts named it "the year of the exit scam." This is why today, we are listing the biggest crypto heists that have been discovered by various researchers. But before we do that, let's give you our two cents on spotting an exit scam. Most of the biggest crypto heists and exit scams have tell-tale signs that investors should look out for. First, they have inconsistent or misleading information behind the project. Second, they usually fake online credibility. And most important, you should always check for user reviews before investing in any form of crypto. Now, let's list the biggest crypto heists done so far:

• $2.9 Billion Plustoken Scam That Could Be Largest Scam Ever

We are starting the list with a famous case. An estimated loss of around $2.9 billion was identified after Chinese police uncovered an alleged Ponzi scheme involving the South Korean wallet provider and exchange PlusToken. Although more is being uncovered about PlusToken, the mystery is all around the key events and there is analysis in the altcoin news about the case.

• Pincoin's Case Which Scalped Investors Out Of An Alleged $660 Million In Tokens

On April 9 last year, two ICOs including iFan and Pincoin were operating under the umbrella of one tech company based in Vietnam. They both went silent after reports showed that 32,000 investors were scalped out of an alleged $660 million in tokens, as Tuoi Tre News reported. Victims are still featured on the best cryptocurrency news sites, claiming the damages amount to roughly 15 trillion Vietnamese dong ($660 million) in token sales. This makes the Pincoin case one of the biggest crypto heists ever.

• QuadrigaCX Made Investors Lose $195 Million In Crypto

The death of the 30-year old CEO of the exchange QuadrigaCX shook the crypto world - not only because he was the head of the largest exchange in Canada - but also because he had full control of the passwords and keys to accounts rendered all the assets on the exchange forever inaccessible. The losses amounted to more than $195 million of stolen cryptocurrency, which makes QuadrigaCX one of the biggest crypto scams too. However, the death of the CEO is still a mystery and there is an ongoing investigation by the FBI on the entire case.  

The legendary American boxer Mike Tyson is in the latest cryptocurrency news for denying the news putting forward his support for a blockchain based platform for fighters that is dubbed Fight to Fame, which is potentially a fraudulent scheme. Tyson published a tweet on August 14 in which he said that he is not part of it. The full tweet reads:

“I am not involved with Fight to Fame or their countdown website, nor will I be involved with anything related to Fight to Fame now or in the future. Any media reporting my current involvement isn’t accurate.”

As reported on many best cryptocurrency news sites before, Mike Tyson will serve as a founder and chairman of the sports and competition committee for allegedly blockchain based sports project Fight to Fame. The project also considered issuing a so-called Tyson Token as well as a token sale in early June. This spring, the cryptocurrency research and analysis firm Cointelligence released the results of its research in the project in which they call the CEO Shi Jianxiang and the project Fight to Fame is "a total fraud" - a statement which went viral in the altcoin news. In contrast to this, Cointelligence revealed that Shi is wanted by Interpol as well as the Chinese regulatory authorities “on charges of fraud and illegal fundraising that caused losses to investors of more than 10 billion yuan [about $1.5 billion]”. However, all of this was later confirmed by Mike Tyson and his wife and manager Lakiha Tyson, who told the technology focused media outlet Modern Consensus that the famous ex-boxer and professional had negotiated working with the project several years ago. However, he later made “very clear [they] ... are not involved with Fight to Fame.” Lakiha Tyson also said that the current mishap is due to an “incautiously signed but very preliminary agreement” with Fight to Fame’s founder Shi Jianxiang, who initially offered Mike Tyson a casting position in a Hong Kong martial arts film. Later on, Lakiha Tyson approved the agreement and amended the clause specifying that as a “partner and co-founder Mike Tyson will cooperate fully with UCMPA,” as well as  hand-wrote “as per agreed in writing at a later date.” She said:

“We had no idea that this was a way to launch this Tyson Token. We didn’t agree to this. I was fuming at this point.”

Chinese Ponzi scheme was the reason for the latest Bitcoin-sell off according to the Primitive founder Dovey Wan as we are reading in the latest cryptocurrency news today. The PlusToken Ponzi scheme scammed more than 200K BTC and 800K ETH and are now hitting hard on the exchanges. What started in the middle of 2018, PlusToken was a classic Chinese Ponzi scheme offering high-yield investment returns. There four about four layers of membership structure offering some increasing dividends. By the start of 2019, there were more than 10 million members. The entire team of the scheme was caught by the police two months ago and will now stay in jail for many years according to Wan. However, the $3 billion of cryptocurrency they scammed out of members has not been recovered yet. Many of the Bitcoin wallet addresses which were used are not believed to be multi-sig which leads to speculation that some of the key holders remain at large. The security audit company Peckshield has been monitoring some money-flow activities from the PlusToken wallets and has found that since early-July, more than 1000 BTC has gone into Bittrex and Huobi and some of the funds were moved into small batches of 50 and 100 bitcoins per batch. Some reports even claim that the Chinese traders noticed that someone was also consistently dumping 100BTC batches into Binance and they believe they are related to PlusToken. According to Wan as we have red in the altcoin news previously, there are three reasons why the exchanges didn’t pay attention. One of the main reasons is that the scam has not been known outside China and maybe South Korea. The Chinese exchanges did not act because the case has been closed officially by the Chinese police. The police also didn’t work with the exchanges because the exchanges are officially banned in China. Now, both Chainalysis and Peckshield are monitoring the coins involved in the scam but the exchanges now also got involved. There is little that can be done about the tokens that were already cashed out but the exchanges are able to freeze the income tokens relating to known scams.

Craig Wright accused again this time by the Bitmessage developer Jonathan Warren of forging documents regarding the Kleiman vs. Wright case as we learned about it in the previous altcoin news. The self-proclaimed Bitcoin creator Craig Wright accused for the millionth time after Jonathan Warren provided his testimony which shows that the accused forged the documents. The redacted court documents from the hearing in July have now just emerged after the testimony. Back in 2018, Dave Kleiman’s estate sued Wright for stealing up to 1 million Bitcoin and in response, Wright alleged that Kleiman signed away the sum as a part of the blind trust they agreed on. Wright’s defence was a series of correspondences which were sent on the Bitmessage platform which describe the trust process as well as the escrow wallet for the trust. However, Warren explained to the court that these correspondences were likely forged because the messaging platform was not online during that time according to the proof submitted by Wright. As we can read in the excerpt from the transcription below in Warren’s cross-examination:

Q: It shows an address beginning with BM-2C? A: Yes. Q: And it also shows a received date of October 22, 2012? A: Yes. Q: What does that tell you about the message? A: It tells me that something has been faked. Either the date has been faked or the screenshot has been faked. Q: Why do you say that? A: Because Bitmessage wasn’t released that time back in October of 2012.

According to Warren, the communication protocol for Bitmessage went live on November 19, 2012 just a month after Craig Wright  claimed to have communicated via the platform. This is not the first time someone accuses Wright of forgery. Back in July, the prosecution counsel accused Wright of forging the trust deed based on an inspection of the metadata from some of the documents that were submitted by the self-proclaimed Bitcoin creator in October 2012. According to the details at the time, the document contains copyright elements that could not exist earlier than 2015 which is exactly two years after Kleiman’s death. The crypto users are still in dispute as we know from the previous reports in the latest cryptocurrency news over Wright’s claim of being Satoshi Nakamoto so this doesn’t help him as well.