Investors in Spain Attacked by a Crypto Scam

Spanish investors filed a Class Action Lawsuit before the National Court of Spain over an alleged $298M crypto scam.

The lawsuit targets an individual accused of scamming over 300 small crypto investors in Spain.

Money Stolen Amounted Up to $3.58 Billion

El Pais stated that the class-action lawsuit claimed that an individual named Javier Biosca Rodrigues supposedly scammed around 250 million euros ($298 million) in cryptocurrencies from the investors.

The victims’ profiles are mixed, starting from domestic employees, retirees, unemployed, notaries, judges, lawyers, tax inspectors, and owners of small businesses who have tried to recover from the coronavirus-driven economic crisis.

Though this is not the first class-action suit filed before the National Court of Spain, it is the first-of-its-kind that is involving a crypto-related case, the local media outlet stated.

The lawyer that represents the victims is Emilia Zballos, who clarified that notwithstanding the class-action lawsuit was filed last March 17, 2021, it wasn’t disclosed to the public “until the deadline for submitting contracts and other documents provided by small investors, in general, has ended.”

Furthermore, Zaballos says that the number of victims “keeps rising each day.”

Particularly, the lawsuit stated the damages sum up to 250 million euros ($298 million), but the lawyer is concerned that the amount can cross the 3 billion euros ($3.58 billion) barrier.

Alleged Ponzi Scheme Collapsed last November 2020

According to the court documents, Biosca has built a scheme based on offering its clients weekly returns on their crypto investments between 20% and 25%. Normally, he focused on acquiring bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin with the collected money.

Clients have indeed initially started to receive the profits from their investments. Because of the trust gained by Biosca, its initial amount of customer base spread the voice and attracted even more investors onto the scheme.

But Biosca reduced the returns promised to 10% or even 8% weekly by the start of January 2020.

He told his customers that he owned a brokerage firm named Algorithms Group, but the company was not in the Spanish National Securities Markets Commission (CNMV). Later in November 2020, Biosca suddenly stopped paying his customers.

Zaballos states that the lawsuit is extended to Biosca’s wife and his older son, accusing them of scam along with other crimes like “as misappropriation, receipt and money laundering, illicit association, crimes against the public treasury, bribery, corporate crimes, concealment and falsification in a public document.”

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