Case Files
Long-form, source-based investigations into the largest cryptocurrency frauds, exit scams and collapses in history — reconstructed from court records, regulatory filings, on-chain data and reputable reporting. Every claim is attributed; nothing is fabricated.
STATUS: Trading liquidity for DBIX sat on smaller exchanges and was thin against the May 2021 price spike, which left the surge wide open to amplification by the false official-adoption narrative.
STATUS: No decentralized liquidity pool was tied to Africrypt. Client funds sat in platform-controlled wallets, which went inaccessible after the April 2021 'hack' announcement and the operators' disappearance.
STATUS: Blockchain forensics by researchers including WizSec indicate the exchange wallets were being drained from as early as 2011, so the claimed reserves were growing insolvent well before the 2014 withdrawal halt.
STATUS: Investigators found that the wallets the exchange called cold storage had been substantially emptied months before Cotten's reported death, with customer funds diverted into personal accounts and accounts on other exchanges.
STATUS: Withdrawals started failing in mid-2019, and liquidity for participants effectively vanished as the operators consolidated and moved funds. In the months that followed, blockchain trackers documented the pooled crypto being pushed through mixing and exchange channels.
STATUS: When the lending program closed in January 2018, liquidity was gone almost at once. BCC shed the overwhelming majority of its value inside a few hours as sellers swamped thin order books and exchanges began delisting the token.
STATUS: Celsius put customer crypto into illiquid DeFi positions, leveraged trades, and mining, which left it unable to meet redemptions. On 12 June 2022 it froze all customer withdrawals, swaps, and transfers, locking depositor assets in place.
STATUS: Much of UST demand sat in the Anchor Protocol, which offered roughly 20% yield. Concentrated withdrawals and a thinning Curve liquidity pool in May 2022 set off the depeg, and the arbitrage mechanism could not absorb it.
STATUS: When customers tried to pull their money out en masse in November 2022, FTX could not meet the redemptions. Prosecutors said roughly $8 billion in customer deposits had been diverted to Alameda and was not available on the exchange.
STATUS: Teaching example: fake staking dashboards report yields from a database counter, not from any verifiable on-chain liquidity pool.
STATUS: Teaching example: unlocked or short-locked LP, plus a large team allocation held outside the lock, marks an exit-ready liquidity rug.
STATUS: Illicit liquidity is funneled toward non-compliant OTC desks linked to the region, where weak KYC enables crypto-to-cash conversion per TRM Labs and Chainalysis reporting.
STATUS: Victim funds are consolidated into USDT on TRON, then layered through intermediary wallets and high-risk OTC desks per Chainalysis and TRM Labs tracing.
STATUS: There was no genuine open-market liquidity. Investors faced heavily restricted or impossible withdrawals, the hallmark of a Ponzi, per US prosecutors.
STATUS: Withdrawals froze in April 2021, and figures running into the billions of dollars in customer assets were reported as unaccounted for as the founder fled, per prosecutors and reporting from the time.