Sorry We Have Run: PlusToken's $17 Billion Exit Scam and the AI Dog
Book: Crypto Wars: Faked Deaths, Missing Billions and Industry Disruption
Author: Erica Stanford
ISBN: 9781398600683
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While Bitconnect was imploding in the West, something bigger was spreading across China and Asia. Starting in June 2018, small WeChat groups began popping up with free crypto tips and optimistic money-making examples. The company behind them was PlusToken. By the time it ended, investors had one message left on the blockchain: “Sorry we have run.”
Stanford puts the scale at up to $6 billion in direct investor losses and a $17 billion market cap at its peak. That would have made PlusToken the third largest cryptocurrency in the world, if anyone had bothered to list it properly on CoinMarketCap.
Building trust, then dropping the pitch
PlusToken’s playbook started soft. Community leaders ran small chat rooms of 100 to 200 people so dissent could be managed. They hosted flashy conferences with strobe lights, K-pop music, and high-pressure sales tactics across China, South Korea, Southeast Asia, Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and Canada.
The audience was not typical crypto early adopters. These were ordinary people who heard stories about easy money and wanted in. PlusToken educated them first, which sounds helpful until you realize the curriculum was designed to mislead.
Once trust was built, the real pitch landed: invest at least $500 and earn 6 to 18 percent per month through their platform.
Decentralized buzzwords and dogs in trading
“Decentralized” was the magic word. After years of exchange hacks like Mt. Gox, anything labeled decentralized felt safer. PlusToken claimed its wallet used artificial intelligence, billion-dollar security tech, and engineers from Samsung and Google Pay who built the product in a Seoul R&D lab. None of it held up.
The centerpiece was a trading bot called AI Dog. Supposedly developed since 2015, it would do arbitrage trading across crypto exchanges, buying low on one platform and selling higher on another. Deposit $500 or more in bitcoin or other major coins, and the dog would trade for you automatically.
Here is the problem Stanford highlights clearly. PlusToken promised your crypto was safe in a decentralized wallet while also claiming the bot was constantly moving that crypto between risky exchanges. You cannot do both. Arbitrage in crypto is dangerous. Exchanges disappear. Transactions get stuck. Wallets get frozen. PlusToken was not targeting people who would notice that contradiction.
High promises and pyramid rewards
Six to 18 percent monthly sounds insane in normal finance. But in mid-2018, some crypto investors had already turned small bets into hundred-fold gains. In China’s MLM-saturated market, those numbers did not even feel shocking to the most naive buyers.
PlusToken paid referral commissions down 10 levels. Bring in a friend who invested $1,000, and you could earn an extra $60 to $180 per month on top of your own returns. Ten referrals at that level meant $600 to $1,800 monthly from commissions alone. Promoters got titles like “Big Boy” and “Great God.” One investor even stuck a PlusToken sign in a vegetable market and filmed it for YouTube, claiming supermarkets accepted the currency.
Within a year, millions of people had deposited the minimum $500. Early payouts kept everyone calm. Until June 2019, when withdrawals started failing.
Sorry we have run
Withdrawal delays turned into total lockouts. PlusToken blamed a hacking attempt, which was partially true in the worst way. While users could not access funds, the team was draining wallets and moving crypto to exchanges they controlled.
In a bitcoin transaction, the founders embedded a message mimicking Satoshi’s genesis block note, but with none of the idealism. Just four words: “Sorry we have run.”
Users had watched balances grow on the app without cashing out. A 5 percent withdrawal fee and promises of more AI Dog profits kept money parked on the platform. But investors never controlled their keys. When the team vanished, everything was gone.
Over 200 victims pushed Seoul authorities to investigate. Chinese police eventually raided Vanuatu and extradited six suspects. But the real ringleaders, including a mysterious figure known as “Mr Leo,” were never caught. Chainalysis tracked hundreds of millions in stolen crypto, and sell-offs from PlusToken wallets kept correlating with bitcoin price crashes long after the scam ended.
The copycat that would not die
One month after PlusToken launched, WoToken appeared with the same model: fake trading bots, impossible yields up to 237 percent annually, and a MasterCard partnership backed by nothing more than the word “MasterCard” typed on a website. Chinese police shut it down in late 2019 after it stole over $1 billion from 715,000 investors. Several ringleaders reportedly came straight from PlusToken.
By July 2020, 109 people were arrested in connection with PlusToken. Billions in stolen crypto may still sit in unknown wallets, ready to hit the market and drag prices down again.
Stanford’s lesson here is not subtle. PlusToken looked like a wallet and exchange. It talked about decentralization, AI, and Samsung engineers. Underneath, it was the same old Ponzi: high promises, a fake bot, pyramid referrals, and an exit message written in stolen bitcoin. The dog never traded. It just barked while the money ran.