The sum of illicit activities related to cryptocurrencies, ranging from ransom requests to payments to evade sanctions against Russia to financing terrorist activities, set a new record in 2022: 20.6 billion dollars, according to the latest available data prepared by the consulting firm Chainanalysis for its Crypto crime report 2023.
It is true that these are small percentages of all transactions, although their weight has doubled: from 0.12% in 2021 to 0.24% in 2022.
Within this figure, the illegal theft of money in crypto-assets deposited in digital wallets also broke a historical record in 2022. We are talking about a sum of 3.8 billion dollars, savings of citizens that have disappeared.
Attracted by the claim of high returns on cryptocurrencies, many users have entrusted their money to the wrong people. Or rather, the wrong platforms. And that they have not been able to recover them. If the memory of the collapse of the FTX platform in the USA is still fresh in the markets, there is no need to go that far.
In Spain we have the case of Arbistar, which is on its way to becoming, pending the end of the trial, the biggest pyramid scam with cryptocurrencies in Spanish criminality. On June 26, the National Court agreed to send the leader of the plot, Santiago Fuentes, to prison.
So far there are more than 5,000 affected people who have reported the events. The indictment presented by the Aránguez Abogados firm (which represents 3,400 victims) requests a sentence of 29 years and nine months in prison for the continued crime of aggravated fraud, document falsification and criminal organization.
Arbistar promoted itself on its website as a company specializing in online cryptocurrency trading and offered a service that “never fails”, supposedly designed to “always win” and that offers very high returns (between 8% and 15%). The incumbent, Santiago Fuentes, promoted on video channels and conferences the virtues of an arbitration system that, for practical purposes, was non-existent. “I don’t think we are dealing with a regulation problem. It is a scam and a fraud that could have taken place with any online entity”, clarifies lawyer José Miguel Taracena, from the aforementioned firm.
Arbistar fraudsters took advantage of the fact that the market (we are talking about the year 2019) was still in its infancy and that many did not master it. “They sought to attract people by offering products or services that promised large and quick financial gains with cryptocurrencies”, explain sources from Aránguez Abogados. With this fresh money coming in, a return was allocated to the people who had already contributed theirs, but without new capital being generated during this time: they were simply moved from one user to another.
“The business, then, is no longer that it lacked economic rationality, but that it did not exist, it was a simple simulation”, describes the judge of the National Court José Luis Calama. “The algorithm never existed and the company only “sold “smoke”, reads the processing order.
In total, there could be more than 30,000 affected. The economic damage would be more than 90 million euros. It is pointed out that 55 of the victims were injured in a sum greater than 50,000 euros each, and another 17, in 250,000 euros. “This pyramid class scheme was not only used so that those who had invested contributed more money, but to attract new people to invest in it after seeing the large, almost immediate benefits perceived by the previous investors”, indicates the National Court.
“With an obvious profit motive, they made the victims believe that they had a serious business structure, when in reality the mentioned system was nothing more than a mirage caused by the blindness of the promised profit”.
