A spectacular kidnapping attempt perpetrated by three hooded men in an urbanization in Calella (Maresme) on June 20 revealed that the victim was actually one of the most wanted alleged swindlers in Brazil, Rodrigo Marques do Santos (São Paulo, 28 /10/1978), CEO of the bitcoin company, Atlas Quantum, who fled in 2021 after allegedly defrauding 40,000 investors of a billion euros. Marques lives in a high standing house surrounded by security measures and protected by several armed men.
"They are not victims, they are criminals" some of those affected by the alleged Atlas fraud who had located the whereabouts of the most famous fugitive in Brazil were quick to warn on social networks. “He set up a company in the name of his brother-in-law and the address was that of his house in Calella,” Matheus Muller tells La Vanguardia, who without hesitation, in November 2021, traveled from Brazil with two other victims, Fabrizio Santos and Marcos Vinicius Viera. , to try to recover their savings. However, the attempt nearly cost them their lives.
The three scammed stayed in a hotel in Calella until locating the Marques mansion "by google maps", a luxurious five-storey house located at 25 Francesc Castells street, valued at 1,250,000 euros. When trying to contact them, they were forced to flee because they were chased and tried to run over Marques's armed henchmen.
The victims report that the men from Marques "pretended to be policemen, put us on our knees and pointed weapons at our heads, stole our cell phones and threatened us" they report, a fact that they reported to the Mossos d'Esquadra, which together The local police proceeded to arrest the two aggressors, one of them "Ubiratán, is the violent security chief of Marques do Santos." One of the images provided in the investigation shows the member of private security, with his hands raised while a local police officer points at him. Mossos sources acknowledge the facts but do not provide data "because there is an open investigation."
The alleged scam, which for the Federal Police of Brazil has "a pyramid structure" and has hundreds of court cases open, occurs when Atlas fails to fulfill promises to pay fixed income on investments made, "yields greater than 5% with arbitrations of bitcoins”. The customer acquisition campaign in the South American country had a great impact because it used famous people for advertising management. An automated robot locates the best investments and moves investors' money.
“At the beginning everything went well, I managed to earn 30,000 euros with an investment of 3,000 euros” details Jorge Eugenio Bocchiardo, an aerospace engineer who now lives in Barcelona and has reported the case to the Mossos, “without paying much attention to me, the TRUE". The same thing happened to Ofir Avny, dedicated to the international real estate business who admits "I have lost about 4.9 bitcoins" almost 100,000 euros.
A good number of victims of the alleged scam are grouped in a legal case managed by the Brazilian law firm Artemio Picanço
The lawyers emphasize that "we are currently in the process of blocking all the accounts and properties of Rodrigo Marques" an initiative that they suspect is late because "it will all be distributed in tax havens" a fortune that, according to estimates, could amount to 2 billion of dollars.
The investigators of the case do not rule out that the attempted kidnapping of the Brazilian tycoon in Calella is related to the reward of 10 bitcoins, about 570,000 euros, offered by Rocelo Lopes, general director of the Brazilian stock exchange Stratum Blockchain Group, to whom he provided data on the whereabouts of the fugitive Other victims acknowledge that "the investigation into Atlas from social networks is very powerful" even discovering that Marques, in his flight, issued a statement in which he faked his death "but his name is not recorded in any death registry."
The alleged Atlas Quantum scam occurred when some customers tried to recover their investment. “Until April 2021 they had been paying the investment returns, an attractive 5%” but the problem came when “you wanted to access all your funds”. The alarm spread and the 40,000 victims began to claim, before the courts and the police, that they had been deceived. A process that is being followed in the 10th Criminal Branch of the Subseçao Judicataria of Sao Paulo and that maintains an investigation open at the Federal Police headquarters that, according to sources close to the case, have already requested the collaboration of the Spanish police.
