The Return of the Cajee Brothers and the Unresolved AfriCrypt Investigation

In Brief

• The AfriCrypt scam collapsed in 2021 when founders Raees and Ameer Cajee claimed a hack drained investor wallets, though forensic evidence showed back-end access was severed days prior and funds were routed through privacy mixers.

• Despite sensationalized early reports of a $3.6 billion loss, official liquidators and the FSCA verify the missing capital to be a more grounded figure between $12.4 million and $223 million.

• The recent return of the Cajee brothers to South Africa’s Zimbali Estate highlights the ongoing, unresolved multi-jurisdictional legal battle where no criminal charges have yet been publicly confirmed.

• In direct response to this massive regulatory vacuum, South Africa has aggressively overhauled its financial laws by declaring crypto assets financial products, mandating strict CASP licensing, and implementing the Travel Rule to prevent future anonymous fund-shuffling.

Recently, an investigative report by Carte Blanche confirmed what many had long speculated: the Cajee brothers, Raees and Ameer, the founders of the AfriCrypt scam, had returned to South Africa. Nearly five years after their platform’s abrupt collapse and the alleged disappearance of hundreds of millions in investor funds, the so-called “Bitcoin Brothers” were traced to the gated Zimbali Estate in KwaZulu-Natal.

Their return might be the next new phase of their case, but is South Africa still the same? This is a recap on the Africrypt investigation and how South Africa’s crypto ecosystem has improved to counteract such scams.

What AfriCrypt was and why its structure made losses hard to unwind

AfriCrypt was founded in 2019 by Raees Cajee, then 20, and his brother Ameer, then 17. The platform marketed itself as an AI-driven arbitrage trading service, promising monthly returns of up to 13%. It accepted South African Rand directly from investors, an unusual fiat on-ramp for a crypto platform, and pooled those funds into wallets controlled entirely by the founders.

However, that’s where the cracks started forming. Investors received no individual private keys. There were no audited financial statements, no external custodians, and no formal licensing, because, at the time, crypto assets were not classified as financial products under South African law.

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As cryptocurrency analyst Wiehann Olivier later noted:

“It was a centralized system pretending to be decentralized. There was no oversight, no third-party security testing, and no asset segregation.”

The structure created a single point of failure. When that failure came, it was swift.

April 2021 Collapse: the “hack” email and the red flags

On April 13, 2021, coinciding with Bitcoin near record valuations, investors received an email from Ameer Cajee claiming the platform had been hacked and all funds lost. Ironically, the communication explicitly urged clients not to report the incident to the authorities. Their reasoning: it would “slow down the recovery process.”

Hanekom Attorneys, representing investors, were immediately suspicious:

“We immediately found it suspicious, as the announcement discouraged investors from filing a case.”

Independent forensic analysis later revealed that employees had lost access to back-end systems seven days before the alleged hack. Administrative logins linked to the Cajee brothers remained active after the announced compromise, accessing wallet data while the founders publicly claimed to be locked out. Forensic records also show successful logins to legacy AfriCrypt admin panels as late as December 2023, using credentials tied to founder email accounts.

Within days of the announcement, the Durban offices were vacated, the website went offline, and the brothers reportedly departed via the Maldives to Dubai. At least $18,580,000 (R300 million) in digital assets was moved through Wasabi Wallet, a privacy tool using CoinJoin mixing, immediately after the hack announcement, with outputs dispersed to platforms including Binance, Kraken, and several non-KYC exchanges.

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How big was the loss? Why the headline number is contested

The AfriCrypt scam produced one of the most widely misreported figures in crypto fraud history. Early coverage cited 69,000 BTC, valued at approximately R54 billion ($3.6 billion), as the sum lost. That figure has since been largely discredited.

Forensic investigators traced the $3.3 billion (R54 billion) claim to a misidentified Luno exchange wallet unrelated to AfriCrypt. Here is where the verified estimates currently stand:

• $12.4 million (R200 million+)—FSCA’s official estimate, based on formal complaints from several hundred victims (considered a conservative floor)

• $223 million (R3.6 billion)—Verified by court-appointed liquidators through bank transfers and internal ledger logs

• $40–50 million—The most cited revised figure from subsequent investigations, though the methodology remains unclear

• $6 million—Raees Cajee’s own affidavit, claiming only “hot wallets” were compromised (widely viewed as a self-serving minimum)

The gap between these reflects genuine uncertainty about how much capital was ever under management versus what was claimed and how much was verifiable on-chain or through recoverable records. The FSCA’s $12.4 million remains the only official regulatory figure. The R3.6 billion verified by liquidators is the most credible upper bound from documented fund flows.

Readers and investors should treat recovering AfriCrypt funds in full as unlikely—not because the loss is small, but because at least R300 million was routed through mixing tools specifically designed to break forensic trails.

Where the Case Sits Now: A Multi-Jurisdictional Pursuit with Partial Visibility

The Cajee brothers’ return does not mean arrest is imminent. Attorney Gerhard Botha, representing an investor claiming losses of approximately $50 million, confirmed in February 2026 that legal papers have still not been served:

“They can protect themselves. They’ve got security because they have money.”

The Hawks confirmed an active investigation across four South African provinces as early as January 2022, with Lieutenant Colonel Philani Nkwalase stating:

“There are multiple victims in these cases. Investigations are ongoing.”

No criminal charges have been publicly confirmed since.

In November 2021, Ameer Cajee was detained in Zurich while visiting safe-deposit boxes believed to contain hardware wallets. Swiss prosecutors confirmed that items “related to a South African fraud case” were seized. However, the case was suspended in 2022 after key investors settled privately, reportedly for around $5 million, a “private resolution” that legal observers describe as a significant barrier to public accountability.

The brothers have also used Vanuatu-issued passports during their post-2021 travel, according to whistleblower data, complicating jurisdictional authority.

South Africa’s Post-2021 Fraud Pattern

South Africa crypto fraud did not begin or end with AfriCrypt. The platform is one node in a broader pattern of high-yield investment schemes that exploited the regulatory vacuum of the early 2020s:

• Mirror Trading International (MTI): An MLM-structured Ponzi promising 10% monthly returns via AI trading. Losses exceeded 23,000 BTC (~$1 billion). CEO Johann Steynberg was arrested in Brazil, extradited to the US, and the platform placed in final liquidation—demonstrating that cross-border cooperation is possible when US enforcement interests align.

• BHI Trust: Fraudulently used the Berkshire Hathaway name to target high-net-worth individuals; losses of R2.3 billion; criminal cases opened.

• Elite Krypto Hub (2026): An unlicensed operator soliciting via social media, prompting an FSCA public warning in January 2026—evidence that even with licensing in place, unregulated operators persist.

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The AfriCrypt scam distinguishes itself through its fiat on-ramp model and its use of a “hack” narrative as the exit strategy.

How South Africa Changed in Regulatory Approach and Technical Guardrails Since 2021

The FSCA’s own head of enforcement acknowledged in 2021 that

“Cryptocurrency was not defined as a financial product, and the FSCA did not have jurisdiction.”

That regulatory lacuna has since been closed through a sequence of enforceable milestones:

Policy and Licensing Controls:

• October 2022: FSCA declared crypto assets as financial products under the FAIS Act—the foundational step

• December 2022: Crypto Asset Service Providers (CASPs) added as accountable institutions under FICA, triggering AML/CFT obligations

• June 2023: The formal CASP licensing regime commenced; as of December 2025, 512 applications had been received, 300 approved, and 14 declined on “fit and proper” grounds.

• October 2025: South Africa was removed from the FATF Grey List, signalling international validation of its AML/CFT reforms.

The Travel Rule—Operational AML Technology:

• April 30, 2025: FIC Directive 9 (the Travel Rule) came into effect, mandating that CASPs collect, verify, and transmit full identity information for both originator and beneficiary on every transfer above R5,000. This directly targets the anonymous fund-shuffling that characterized the AfriCrypt collapse.

Tax Enforcement as a New Accountability Layer:

• March 2026: SARS implemented the Crypto Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), enabling automatic exchange of crypto tax data with foreign jurisdictions. As tax attorney Jashwin Baijoo noted:

 

“The era when crypto traders could assume their assets were beyond SARS’s purview is over.”

Exchange-Level Scam Prevention:

The FSCA’s licensing criteria now include requirements for comprehensive business plans, AML policies, operational readiness, and competency, barriers AfriCrypt could never have cleared. The FSCA has initiated 81 investigations into potentially unlicensed CASP businesses.

What This Means for Investors and the Market

For what happened to AfriCrypt investors, the honest answer in 2026 remains. There is no confirmed fund recovery, no criminal conviction, and no civil papers yet served. The liquidation process, led by Eugene Januarie and Welcome Jacobs, continues, but the directors have withheld source codes and wallet keys, requiring liquidators to operate with “extended powers.”

On the flipside, the regulatory architecture that now exists would make an AfriCrypt-style platform far harder to operate legally and far easier to detect operating illegally. The CASP licensing regime, the Travel Rule, and CARF together close the three channels AfriCrypt exploited: unregulated custody, anonymous transfers, and offshore tax opacity.

The Zimbali return of the Cajee brothers will likely determine whether South Africa’s new legal framework can serve process on well-resourced defendants as effectively as it now licenses compliant operators. That outcome remains, for now, unresolved.