PlusToken and Arbistar: the bot that always wins

What happened to PlusToken and Arbistar? PlusToken was a crypto wallet from China with a built-in "arbitrage bot" that promised high monthly returns. It collapsed in June 2019, and in 2020 a Chinese court found that its organisers had taken about 14.8 billion yuan (around 2.25 billion dollars) and sent the leaders to prison for up to 11 years. Arbistar 2.0 from Tenerife in Spain promised profits from its "Community Bot" and froze customers' money in 2020. In 2025 Spain's National Court convicted its founder of fraud of about 200 million euros; in March 2026 an appeal raised his sentence to about 16 years.

Two continents, two languages, one product: a robot that never loses. If such a robot existed, its owners would be quietly buying islands, not running referral programs on Telegram.

The promise: arbitrage on autopilot#

Arbitrage means buying something where it is cheaper and selling it at the same moment where it is more expensive. If bitcoin costs 60,000 dollars on one exchange and 60,050 on another, you buy on the first and sell on the second. It is a real strategy – but:

• the differences between big exchanges are tiny, often hundredths of a percent;
• professional firms with fast servers and huge capital compete for them within milliseconds;
• the more money you push in, the faster the difference disappears.

So arbitrage can earn small, uneven profits on limited money. It cannot pay steady double-digit monthly returns to millions of customers. That is the core of the "bot that always wins" trick.

PlusToken: the wallet with a secret bot#

1. You downloaded the PlusToken wallet and deposited bitcoin, ether or other coins (a minimum of about 500 dollars, according to reports).
2. An "AI" arbitrage bot was said to trade your coins between exchanges and pay you daily returns in the platform's own PLUS token – reports speak of roughly 10 to 30 % a month.
3. Recruiting paid extra. Members earned commissions on people they brought in, several levels deep.
4. In June 2019 withdrawals stopped. Messages claimed the team had been arrested or "hacked". Several suspects were arrested in Vanuatu.

According to the Chinese court, the scheme had more than 2 million members. Instead of trading, the organisers collected the coins. Police later seized almost 195,000 BTC, 833,000 ETH and billions of other tokens – worth over 4 billion dollars at the end of 2020.

And the bitcoin price? In 2019 the analytics company Chainalysis traced large amounts of PlusToken bitcoin being sold through exchanges and suggested that this selling may have pushed the bitcoin price down. That is an analyst's estimate, not a proven fact – but it shows how big the scheme was.

Arbistar 2.0: the Spanish edition#

Arbistar 2.0 was a company based in Tenerife in the Canary Islands. It sold access to its "Community Bot", which was supposed to earn on price differences between exchanges and pay customers regular profits. Many people came through recommendations from friends and "leaders" on social media.

In August 2020 withdrawal requests started being refused, and in September Arbistar blamed a "computer error" in the bot that had supposedly shown customers profits that did not exist. Customers could not get their bitcoin out. The court later found that the bot had no real trading capacity at all.

According to Spain's National Court (Audiencia Nacional), about 32,000 people lost around 200 million euros. In September 2025 it sentenced founder Santiago Fuentes Jover to 8 years for continued fraud and forgery. In March 2026 the court's appeals chamber roughly doubled the sentence to about 16 years and also convicted him and co-founder Diego Felipe Fernández Nojarova (about 11 years) of belonging to a criminal organisation. They appealed to the Supreme Court, so as of the latest reports the ruling is not final.

Timeline#

Warning signs you could have seen#

• A bot that never has a losing day. Real trading systems, even good ones, lose sometimes.
• High returns from a strategy that earns tiny margins. Arbitrage earns fractions of a percent – not 10 % a month.
• Returns paid in the platform's own token. That costs the platform nothing to print.
• You cannot see the trades. No exchange accounts, no audited results – only a dashboard they control.
• Bonuses for recruiting. A real trading firm does not need your neighbours' money.
• "Technical errors" when withdrawals pile up. A sudden glitch exactly when people want out is a classic ending.

Common myths#

• "The bot is AI, so it can beat the market." "AI" on a website is a word, not proof. Nobody shows you what the bot really does.
• "I can see my profits growing in the app." The app shows what its owners want. A number on a screen is not money in your wallet.
• "It is big, so it must be legitimate." PlusToken had millions of members. Size made the fall bigger, not the scheme safer.

Sources#

• CoinDesk: PlusToken ringleaders jailed for up to 11 years (opens in a new tab)
• Bitcoin Magazine: Chainalysis on PlusToken selling bitcoin (opens in a new tab)
• El Español: 8 years for Arbistar's founder (September 2025) (opens in a new tab)
• Confilegal: the National Court doubles the Arbistar sentences (March 2026) (opens in a new tab)
• Canarias7: Arbistar's convicts appeal to the Supreme Court (opens in a new tab)