The amount of illegal activities related to cryptocurrencies, ranging from ransom requests, to payments in order to circumvent sanctions against Russia to financing for terrorist activities, set a new record in 2022: 20.6 billion dollars, according to the latest Available data prepared by the Chainanalysis Crypto Crime Report 2023 consultancy. It is true that these are small percentages of all transactions, although their weight has doubled: it has gone 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 set a historical record in 2022. We are talking about an amount of 3.8 billion dollars, savings of citizens that have vanished.

Attracted by the claim of high returns from cryptocurrencies, many are the users who have entrusted their money to the wrong people. Or better, the wrong platforms. And that they have not been able to recover it. If the memory of the collapse of the FTX platform in the US is still fresh in the markets, it is not necessary to go that far.

In Spain we have the case of Arbistar, which is on its way to being, pending the end of the trial, the largest pyramid scam with cryptocurrencies of Spanish crime. On June 26, the National Court agreed to imprison the ringleader of the plot, Santiago Fuentes.

To date there are more than 5,000 affected who have denounced the facts. In the indictment presented by the Aránguez Abogados law firm (representing 3,400 victims), a sentence of 29 years and nine months in prison is requested for the continued crime of aggravated fraud, documentary falsification and criminal organization.

Arbistar promoted itself from its website as a company specializing in cryptocurrency trading on the internet, offering a service that “never fails”, supposedly designed to “always win”, offering very high returns (between 8% and 15%). The owner, 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 facing a regulatory problem. It is a scam and a fraud that could have taken place with any online entity”, qualifies the lawyer José Miguel Taracena, from the aforementioned law firm.

Arbistar scammers 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. “The aim was to attract people by offering products or services that promised large and quick financial gains with cryptocurrencies,” explain sources at Aránguez Abogados. With this fresh money that came in, a return was assigned to those who had already contributed theirs, but without new capital being generated during this time: it 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 mere simulation”, describes the judge of the National Court José Luis Calama. “The algorithm never existed and the company only “sold” smoke, the indictment reads.

In total, there could be more than 30,000 affected. The economic damage would be more than 90 million euros. It is noted that 55 of the injured were in an amount greater than 50,000 euros each, and another 17, in 250,000 euros. “This pyramid-type scheme was not only used for those who had invested to contribute more money, but to attract new people who invested when they saw the great almost immediate benefits that previous investors received,” says the National Court.

“With an obvious profit motive, they made the victims believe that they had a serious business structure, when in reality said system was nothing more than a mirage caused by the blindness of the promised profit.”