“I just wanted to live like them.” Marta, 51 years old, is embarrassed and doesn’t know how to continue the sentence. Nobody in his family knows that he lost thousands of euros in Omegapro, a pyramid scam in cryptocurrencies that promised to triple the investment in just under a year.
Marta is one of the almost three million people scammed by this investment company, which held major promotional events with dozens of footballers and celebrities: from Figo and Ronaldinho to Fernando Hierro, Casillas, Puyol and Roberto Carlos, through boxers like Floyd Mayweather or actors like Steven Seagal. It is estimated that the money defrauded amounts to 3,000 million euros.
This woman, whose name has been changed, explains that she was convinced by the lifestyle of a neighbor who insisted she invest in the fraud. “She is a widow and has three children, but she led a spectacular life,” he recalls by phone from his home on a Balearic island, which he asks not to reveal. “I thought: Why not me?”
Like a silent epidemic, the Omegapro scam jumped from country to country, from family to family. This newspaper has interviewed more than 20 victims around the world: France, Spain, Belgium, Colombia, Nigeria… Some went so far as to put their entire family in debt and lost contact with them, others even asked for loans or lost all their savings.
All those interviewed admit that, when doubts arose about whether the high returns offered by Omegapro could be a fraud, they reviewed the magnitude of the events and the renown of the celebrities who participated in them to convince themselves.
“Seeing the footballers made me trust,” explains Manuel, 31 years old, from a municipality near Soria. “I asked for a loan of 15,000 euros and ended up losing my savings. I still owe a part to my parents, who helped me get out of trouble.”
The design of the fraud, which offered juicy monthly payments to anyone who brought new clients to the company, led many investors to dedicate themselves practically full time to attracting new clients for the pyramid scheme, achieving salaries much higher than those of their jobs.
“There came a time when I earned three times as much money with Omegapro as with my job as a teacher,” said Juan Castro, a man in his forties in the municipality of Amagá, on the outskirts of Medellín. “I left my job and dedicated myself to bringing new investors to the company.”
Castro did it with conviction. He was happy with his new job and felt like he was helping his people make money. The first thousand dollars you invested at the beginning of 2021 turned into three thousand in just over a year. There came a time when he convinced his brothers, his uncles and practically everyone around him to invest in Omegapro.
“It seemed to me that I was doing good,” he recalls now. When payments were suspended, in November 2022, dozens of people blamed him for the losses and began asking him for the money they had invested.
“I was able to pay some of them out of my pocket, but I didn’t have enough money for everyone,” he maintains. Castro explains that he had to move from his municipality and “start from scratch” in another place, which he asks not to reveal. “It’s not that I’ve lost all my money, it’s that I’ve even lost my family,” he says.
In Tocanzipá, another Colombian municipality near Medellín, the scam is estimated to have reached 4,000 people in a town of 40,000 inhabitants. “Everyone has been scammed or knows someone who fell for the scam,” explains Carlos, a neighbor who also lost thousands of euros. “The city has been marked by Omegapro.”
“Of course at some point you think that this growth is not sustainable,” says Robert, an agricultural technician from a town near Antwerp, in Belgium. “But then you saw who was involved and you thought it couldn’t possibly be a fraud.”
When celebrities participated in events promoting this fraud, half a dozen international regulators, including the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) in Spain, had warned that this company was a “financial beach bar” and recommended not investing in it. .
A pyramid of prizes and luxury
Each investor who brought a new client to Omegapro obtained 10% of what the new victim earned. If that client followed the pyramid and continued to attract more investors, the first on the list got 7% of each new client.
The pyramid distinguished different ranks depending on how much investment volume each one brought through their victims. The range Silver It was for those who brought an investment of between 16,000 and 24,000 euros per month. The range Blue DiamondFor example, it was for those who brought in between 140,000 and 240,000 euros per month through their affiliates.
Each person’s rank determined their position in the company, which rewarded victim catchers with trips to Dubai or the Maldives. If one was in the highest categories one could even speak at these events or personally meet the founders of the fraud.
“It was important to motivate small leaders,” explains Romain Muller, one of the main people responsible for attracting clients in that country, from a prison in France (his current sentence is not related to Omegapro).
“On the trips they took care of us, everything was very well organized,” continues Muller. “There were gala dinners, gifts for everyone, you could meet the founders of the company….”
At one of these events that Muller attended, held in Dubai, Omegapro rewarded the victim capturers with checks and gifts. About 600 people from the range Diamond They were given watches valued at around 7,000 euros. To the 120 members with the rank Blue Diamondamong whom was Muller, rewarded them with a check for $100,000 each. There were 35 senior members who received checks for $250,000. The 13 members in the highest category received checks for one million dollars each as prizes.
The value of these gifts, the opulence and luxury that everything related to Omegapro exuded, together with the prestige of the celebrities who supported it, played in favor of the credibility of the company, maintain all the sources consulted.
“The management did not respond when we asked for information”
Muller’s testimony allows us to get an idea of how the core of the fraud worked. This middle-aged man was the second European to obtain the rank Blue Diamond thanks to its task of attracting new investors. That gave him some access to the scam’s founders who are now imprisoned or on the run.
“I started by attracting a hundred people who, by following the chain, amounted to a thousand active investors,” he recalls. “In the end I earned about 30,000 euros on average per month thanks to Omegapro. “The best month I made 76,000 euros.”
With some experience in financial products, Muller asked in June 2020 whether this level of profitability was sustainable and what would happen when profits fell. “The response I got was silence,” he recalls. “We never had access to the company’s accounting even though we were actively working to attract investors.”
Muller remembers the skills that the founders of the fraud – currently in prison or on the run from justice – had to defend the reliability of the company. “I have not seen anyone as eloquent and convincing as Dilawar Singh,” he says of the main founder, whose whereabouts have been unknown for two years.
When Muller was able to unofficially see some internal documents about Omegapro, he discovered that the risk was very high and began to ask more questions. “They responded in a bad way, telling me that they couldn’t tell me,” he recalls. “I suffered a lot because then they started to separate me from the structure.”
Finally, in the summer of 2022, he made a live broadcast on Facebook in which he questioned the company’s credibility. This customer recruiter admits that he believed “90%” that the company was a pyramid scam, but when questioned about this aspect he responded that the product had risks like any high-profit investment.
Asked about the responsibility of the footballers who promoted the fraud, Muller has no doubt that they should be held accountable.
“They and the Government of Dubai are complicit in what has happened,” he says. “In the same way that it is stupid to invest in something just because there are footballers, I think what these athletes did was a shame, they should have done a little research.”
The CNMV reproaches the players for their actions
After the publication on Monday by this medium of an investigation in which the connivance of soccer players with this pyramid fraud was pointed out, the CNMV has issued a statement in which it reproaches the actions of the athletes.
“With a simple name check, you can avoid promoting schemes that sometimes end up causing great harm to investors and their followers,” says the Spanish regulator.
The CNMV remembers that the fight against fraud “concerns many levels of society” and recommends always consulting its list of financial bars, in which Omegapro has been included since January 2020.
The regulator specifies that its lists of financial beach bars “can also be used by public figures who are proposed to participate in events promoting investment campaigns.”
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