The scam that uses the image of Dani Rovira and Pablo Motos returns: they swindle 54,500 euros from a Barcelona businessman

They publish advertisements and fake news on the Internet using the image of Dani Rovira, Pablo Motos, Alberto Chicote or David Broncano. They assure that these celebrities have pocketed large quantities of money thanks to its investments in Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency and digital payment system. This is how they attract their victims and encourage them to entrust their savings to this “golden lagoon”. Several investors reported having been scammed using this method in 2019. Three years later, the scammers have returned to their old ways, according to CASO ABIERTO, the investigation and events portal of Prensa Ibérica.

A businessman from Barcelona went to the Civil Guard Command of the Ciudad Condal on March 1 and reported that, in just one month, he had been swindled out of 54,500 euros. According to him in his complaint, which this medium has accessed, the man was browsing the Economy section of a national newspaper on January 14 when a news item appeared on his computer: “Dani Rovira’s latest investment amazes experts and terrifies big banks”.

The article, which included a photo of Pablo Motos and another of Roviraassured that “there are Spaniards who are pocketing millions of euros from their homes thanks to this golden lagoon”. The businessman, fond of investing in currencies, clicked on the news and gave his name and telephone number so that they could send him more information.

Then, “a woman who spoke Spanish with an English accent, called me from a phone with a UK prefix and introduced herself as Mayya, told me that she was going to be my personal advisor. She was very kind, attentive and very smart, she had knowledge of trading and, while guiding me on possible investments, he worried about me, about things like whether I had eaten or slept well“, recalls this Catalan executive in statements to OPEN CASE.

Mayya convinced him to perform a first investment of 500 euros and then provided him with a username and password so that he could access a “trading” web page and see in real time how his money was fluctuating. “I invested in companies of gas, gold, on amazon… I have experience, I’m not a novice at this stuff, so I did checks. But they have such a well mounted deception that even the data that they were offering on the market were realalso the platform and the account in which they made me deposit my money, with which, at first, you do not suspect that they are scamming you”, affirms the businessman.

In just one week, his investment paid off: “From 500 euros I went to have 900with which I won 400 euros in just a few days”. Then, Mayya asked him for more money.

To get him to agree, the woman was “convincing and soaping the victim with the love bombing method” or love bombing, according to the employer’s complaint. The woman “took advantage of vulnerability to loneliness that the man, 53 years old and a widower, has” and “little by little he managed to gain his trust until he entered into a pseudo-romantic relationship without sexual elements“. The businessman invested another 6,000 euros. And then, 7,000 more, and another 9,000… and so on until he delivered 54,500 euros. To reach that figure, he had to request two bank loans, of 20,000 and 15,000 euros, respectively.

“Mayya called me on the phone at least three times a day and we wrote to each other on WhatsApp at all hours,” he recalls. Many of these conversations and messages are already in the hands of the Civil Guard. The woman was alternating whatsapp of a personal nature with advice on financial operations, which she executed herself with the man’s passwords, with messages to encourage the businessman when an investment went wrong: “Hello, darling. Good morning… you haven’t slept Not at all. You have to sleep, honey, take care of yourself, I know that everything will get better“.

In some of these messages, it is seen how the man hesitates or asks him to “stop operations” and go “slower”. He even confesses to the woman, after several sleepless nights worried about the transactions: “I’m a little stressed and tense”. So she asks him why and he replies: “I don’t know, everything, I feel like this, I’m nervous, but well, I trust it will go away, I need a massage”. Mayya replies: “these are the consequences and necessities of being rich”and sends her a heart.

The employer even goes so far as to ask you to send him a picture of youbut she replies: “haha, here (referring to the office) I can’t send it”.

On February 22, a few days after Mayya congratulated the whistleblower on Valentine’s Day with hearts via whatsappthe man wakes up with a surprise and writes to his manager: “I have looked at the account and it had two million euros. Is this real, honey? I must be dreaming. Please wake me up from what I’m living, honey, I don’t know what to say. I have no words. Until I see the money I don’t believe it.”

He didn’t see a single euro. “I asked her to withdraw part of the money and she replied that in order to do so, she had to pay a a commission of 2.5% to your company. That is, in order to get a million euros of the money he had supposedly earned, he first had to give them €25,000“, denounces the businessman, represented by the lawyer José Antonio Tuero and advised by Alberto Mondragón, responsible for the website denuncioestafa.com.

“I realized the fraud. I told him that not a single penny more came out of my account. First they would give me my money and from that money I would pay them, I offered to pay three times the commission they asked for, but nothing. The next day, my account was blocked.”

With the help of a computer scientist, the businessman has managed to find out that the scammers operate from servers hosted on Ireland and the United States, which makes it difficult for researchers to locate them. In May 2019, Pablo Motos already denounced in ‘El Hormiguero’ that they were using his image to deceive many users: “This is a publication in which an image of me appears without my consent and a supposed way to earn easy money through a link. I insist: It is a scam and I take this opportunity to report it here because I have no way to defend myself.” The presenter added: “Neither we nor my lawyers located the company. The Civil Guard of computer crimes is involved in it, because they are camouflaged in different domains in different parts of the world.

Since he filed his complaint, the Barcelona businessman has continued to receive calls from phones similar to Mayya’s in which they try to get more money out of him: “In one of those calls they pretended to be the british treasurythey wanted to claim a debt from me, they asked me to pay taxes for having operated in your country and for wanting to extract my money”.