The Prosecutor’s Office and the Civil Guard want to intervene the millionaire funds located in 41 email addresses that link with the company Nimbus, based in Malta and which they accuse of weaving an international network to divert the money invested in cryptocurrencies by hundreds of savers. According to several writings sent to the Court of Instruction 4 of Huelva, which opened these investigations at the beginning of the year, both the Public Ministry and the armed institute consider it necessary to issue rogatory commissions abroad to identify those responsible for the accounts under suspicion and order the “ judicial seizure ”of the amounts deposited there. In total, according to their reports, these can hold up to 288 bitcoins, whose value exceeds 12 million euros with the current price.
The researchers assure that, with this measure, they try to prevent a part of the allegedly scammed funds from disappearing and that the armed institute would have managed to locate by following the trail of cryptocurrency movements gestated around the Nimbus platform, which they put in the spotlight and linked to Andrea Zanon, a former World Bank consultant identified as the company’s former CEO. Contacted by EL PAÍS, Nimbus Platform assures that it is not involved in any type of fraud and that no judge has accused those responsible, in addition to ignoring any initiative of the investigators: “We believe that it is nothing more than a continuation of the disinformation campaign to damage Nimbus platforms. We have never been involved in illegal or unethical activities. “
Faced with the defense of Nimbus, the Prosecutor’s Office describes a very different scenario. In a letter dated July 16, to which EL PAÍS has had access, the accusation points out that there are indications that the company devised a system of “malicious capture” of funds for their subsequent diversion to third parties. According to the thesis of the public ministry, this company offered savers to manage their bitcoin portfolios with the promise that their “revaluation” would later translate into a distribution of benefits. In this way, it delivered to the depositor an electronic certificate – “which is called a token” – that represents the “ownership or the right to receive a quantity of bitcoins” and that “is supposed to be backed by the deposits that the platform has.” But, as the researchers repeat in their reports, the formula devised hid other dark intentions.
The Prosecutor’s Office maintains that the group of suspects – to whom the name of “criminal organization” is attributed – really made an effort to collect the largest possible volume of funds with the aim of “generating sufficient capital to maintain the appearance of an investment activity capable of reporting and supporting profits that the first depositors could consider legitimate ”. Then, there came a time when Nimbus ceased its financial activity, according to the Prosecutor’s Office and the Civil Guard. “And representative tokens or titles have been left without support,” emphasizes the public prosecutor.
According to the investigators’ reports, Nimbus is not “buying and selling” bitcoins in search of profitability, but is “transferring them to third parties, applying laundering techniques”. In addition, the public ministry deepens, the Civil Guard has detected “multiple aggregated transfers” that try to prevent the trace of bitcoins from being followed. “It is an activity that does not make any sense from the investor point of view and all the profit under the prism of money laundering”, the accusation rivets, adding: “The progressive exit of these bitcoins implies a decapitalization at the margin of the agreements reached with the depositors ”. On the other hand, Nimbus Platform denies all the accusations and defends that “it is fully operational”, developing its activity “in 121 countries for more than 50,000 people”.
In a first letter sent to the court in early 2021, the Civil Guard estimated at 135.8 million dollars (more than 110 million euros) the collective fraud allegedly perpetrated by the company. Now, in a new report dated this summer, the armed institute has managed to identify where a part of those funds allegedly went. The agents have identified the email addresses of the “exchanger“-” virtual version of the exchange houses “that serve as digital cryptocurrency exchangers in other assets, explains the Prosecutor’s Office – that supposedly received the transfers of the diverted amounts.
The Civil Guard identifies 30 addresses belonging to the exchanger Coinbase, to which 45.68 bitcoins were reportedly sent between May 2020 and September 2021. And also 11 addresses from the exchanger Binance, which would show a positive balance of 242.4 bitcoins. For this reason, the armed institute asked to issue an international rogatory commission to both virtual “exchange houses” so that the users of said accounts could be identified and the funds they have could be blocked. A measure supported by the Prosecutor’s Office.
In fact, the public ministry urged the Huelva court to adopt this initiative given the possibility that the funds located will end up disappearing again. “The most decisive element of the urgency of their intervention is the extreme facility that the authors would have to make those assets vanish with a pair of keys that are in their possession and some keystrokes on the screen of a mobile phone” , argues the public ministry: “Transfer those assets to other accounts or virtual wallets (wallets) is extremely simple, while relocating them becomes an impossible game of chance ”.
“Having located the whereabouts of bitcoins is a stroke of luck whose magnitude cannot be understood by anyone who is unfamiliar with this technology,” continues the public accusation, which comes to compare the Nimbus case with the historic pyramid scheme carried out by former Afinsa executives through the sale of seals. The lawyer and former prosecutor Carlos Aránguez, who represents a group of alleged victims and who promoted the case, defined Nimbus as “a very sophisticated pyramid scam, in which complex containment mechanisms are used to delay the collapse of the structure: Investors were offered all kinds of alternatives to delay the repayment of their funds ”.
Of course, the initiative of the Prosecutor’s Office and the Civil Guard to block the funds has run into an important wall. The Nimbus case It started in the Court of Instruction 4 of Huelva after receiving a complaint from a private individual for the alleged scam of 9,000 euros through the platform, but is currently experiencing a situation of paralysis awaiting a decision on which judicial body directs the investigation. On April 12, Judge Javier Pérez Minaya, head of the Huelva court, sent the case to the National High Court considering that it should assume jurisdiction because it is an alleged scam that affects a “generality of people” from all over Spain and includes crimes committed abroad.
New research in Granada
In fact, the Court of Instruction 9 of Granada, which had received a similar complaint, has ruled in the same sense on September 20, according to a car that EL PAÍS has had access to. In his letter he recalls that “fraud and machinations to alter the price of things that produce or may produce serious repercussions on the security of commercial traffic, on the national economy or patrimonial damage in a generality of people in the territory of more than one Audiencia ”. In addition, it includes the argument that “the object of the staging of fraud (acquisition of cryptocurrencies) will require the adoption of complex and international investigation measures that, for the benefit of the better administration of justice, must be adapted accordingly. jointly for all similar cases ”.
But the National Court has not yet notified if it takes over the investigations and has decided that, while ruling on it, all the proceedings are carried out by the judge of Huelva. But this court, at the request of the Prosecutor’s Office and the Civil Guard, responded that it has no competence to issue rogatory commissions abroad: “This court lacks jurisdiction to instruct acts committed outside the national territory and, therefore, it cannot instruct further of what has already been instructed, leaving the proceedings exclusively pending that the Central Investigating Court [de la Audiencia Nacional] resolve your jurisdiction, ”reads a ruling signed by Judge Pérez Minaya on September 16.
The National Court does currently keep three other investigations open for alleged fraud with cryptocurrencies that trace the traditional pyramid scam: those baptized as Arbistar cases, Algorithms and Kualian. In these summaries, the researchers calculate the damage at more than 350 million euros and put those affected in tens of thousands. According to the different investigations, high levels of profitability were offered to attract savers. For example, as the judge José Luis Calama stated about Arbistar: “What this plot allegedly did was use a part of the money obtained from investors to deliver it to other previous investors in payment of the high agreed interest, which generated great confidence in them that their investment was safe and very profitable, in such a way that they encouraged themselves to invest a greater amount of money in the hope of obtaining an even greater return ”.