Authorities in South Africa have retrieved R475,000 (about $25,640 USD) from Chinese Ponzi fraudsters using “click a button” apps.
Investors “clicked a button” to purchase farm animals via Ant Ranch, an app scam.
Every day, the animals produced fictitious “yield,” which was then sold to fictitious purchasers for a daily return on investment that could be withdrawn.
Yes, the idea is completely ridiculous, but that’s true of all “click a button” software scams. The smartest people in the world are not their aim.
Ant Ranch, a Chinese organized crime group, began operating in 2023 and specifically targeted South Africa.
Ant Ranch, which was launched in or around May 2023, fell apart around early October.
Authorities traced bank accounts in November 2023 after an East London resident lodged a complaint, according to Ernest Mabuza of Times Live.
One account built by an unnamed Lesotho person still had money in it, but all the accounts created by Chinese fraudsters had already been blocked and depleted.
According to Mabuza’s report dated January 29, 2025,
With the exception of one account, which had R475,000, all of these accounts—which were created by Chinese nationals—were drained and closed.
The FIC temporarily froze this account because one of the complainants had made one of his several deposits into it.
On November 7, 2023, the AFU got a preservation order against the account, which resulted in its freezing. A Lesotho native, whose whereabouts is unknown, established the account.
The AFU was successful in getting the state to issue a forfeiture order against the saved money on January 21.
The sixty-five Ant Ranch victims who made deposits into the account will get the forfeited money. The proportion of recovery that is made up of confiscated money is unknown.
It’s also unclear how many Ant Ranch investors there were overall and how much they lost overall.
South-east Asian “click a button” Ponzi schemes are run by Chinese organized criminal groups in scam factories.
Because of his connections to Chinese human trafficking fraud enterprises, Cambodian politician Ly Yong Phat was sanctioned by the US Department of Treasury in September 2024.
Phat is accused of providing sanctuary to Chinese fraudsters operating out of Cambodia via a number of businesses he controls.
Since October 2023, Myanmar says it has deported more than 50,000 Chinese fraudsters.
China, for its part, is still taking no aggressive steps to stop its nationals from operating scam factories overseas.
