boonchai wedmakawand/Getty Images
The CEO of South African bitcoin trading planform MTI, which was provisionally liquidated in late December after it stopped paying out funds to thousands of members, has not been heard from in four weeks.
The group's head of communications and marketing says only Johann Steynberg can answer the question of anxious MTI investors.
While MTI has in the past denied it was a ponzi scheme, a professor of counter fraud studies says get-rich-quick schemes are likely to have proliferated due to Covid-19.
"The only person that can pay members their bitcoin back is the man that owned MTI and controlled the bitcoin, bot, broker and server, Johann Steynberg."