A school director warned two years ago about an alleged financial training academy that recruited young people with the false promise of guiding them towards financial freedom. Several students had stopped attending class and some of them had even left home. The case of IM Academy, one of the most emblematic alleged scams related to cryptocurrencies, highlights the persuasive power of gurus and groups that, through coercive control techniques, capture the minds of thousands of young people.
“My daughter began to say that school and university were useless, that her father and I were failures who worked 8 or 10 hours a day, that there were much simpler and easier ways to earn money,” he explains in the podcast “Bolsillo” Lucía’s mother, a pseudonym to protect the identity of a minor who left her home when her parents refused to continue paying the fees of the organization that recruited her.
Francisco Jiménez, lawyer and vice president of the Association of People Affected by Cryptocurrencies, assures that the phenomenon is spreading. “We are continually receiving cases and detecting ‘cryptosects’.” Spain, a country that leads youth unemployment in Europe, is fertile ground for groups that promote “simplifying” and “apparently quick” practices to become rich, reasons psychologist Miguel Perlado.
Social networks and instant messaging applications, mainly Instagram and Telegram, function as their speakers. “There is no control,” denounces Juantxo Domínguez, president of the Sectarian Prevention and Abuse of Weakness Network (RedUNE). For his part, Javier Santacruz (AEPF) dismantles the fallacies of gurus and ‘crypto-sects’ who claim to hold the master formula for economic success. There is no better prevention than knowledge.
‘Bolsillo’ is a biweekly podcast that offers information, experiences and advice to learn how to better manage household finances. You can listen to and subscribe to “Bolsillo” through podcast platforms such as Spotify, Apple or Google podcast, among others.
If you want to contact the La Vanguardia “Bolsillo” team to participate in future podcasts or suggest a question of interest to you, you can send an email to pocket@lavanguardia.es.