How Africrypt investors were fleeced and left high and dry

They disappeared with billions, left regulators flat-footed and triggered one of the biggest financial implosions in South African history.

- By Yeshiel Panchia

In April 2021, Africrypt, a cryptocurrency investment platform run by brothers Raees and Ameer Cajee, abruptly collapsed. What followed was one of the most dramatic implosions in South Africa’s financial history: R3.6-billion vanished overnight, leaving thousands of investors without funds and an abundance of unanswered questions.

The brothers disappeared into a regulatory vacuum that allowed them to evade accountability for more than two years.

“Tt was a centralised system pretending to be decentralised,” said cryptocurrency analyst Wiehann Olivier. “There was no oversight, no third-party security testing and no asset segregation.”

Africrypt launched in 2019, with Raees, then 20, and Ameer, then 18, marketing themselves as prodigious crypto entrepreneurs. Their pitch was seductive: returns of up to 10% a day, enabled by proprietary trading algorithms and arbitrage systems.

At the time, with less public understanding of the crypto market, their youth and apparent expertise could almost be seen to lend credence to their claims, as did their social media presence, which flaunted designer clothes and international travel.

By 2020, they claimed to manage hundreds of millions of rands in thousands of client accounts. But the reality is that Africrypt was structurally opaque: there were no audited statements, external custodians, or formal financial licensing. As later legal filings and investor testimony revealed, the Cajees retained complete control over the platform's wallet infrastructure and funds.