The Spanish police, in cooperation with the authorities in Germany and other European countries, have arrested a gang that is said to have stolen an estimated 2.4 billion euros from fraudulent trading in cryptocurrencies.

In Spain alone, more than 17,000 investors are said to have been tricked, as the Spanish police unit Guardia Civil has now announced.

Franz Nestler

Editor in Business.

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However, the number of victims could be well into the hundreds of thousands, since these are still only the first findings of the investigation.

How many victims there may have been in Germany and other countries was not initially reported.

Kyiv, Albania, Spain

The Guardia Civil is currently working with the Catalan police, but also with authorities from other countries: including Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Ukraine, Georgia, Albania and Germany.

Already a week ago - on November 8th and 9th - Spanish officials in Albania, together with the country's authorities, arrested two of the alleged gang leaders.

16 other suspects are now under investigation.

A call center involved in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, which employed around 800 people, was dissolved.

Many of the gang's employees apparently knew nothing of the criminal background.

They should not be held accountable by the authorities of the respective country, a police spokesman said on request.

The investigations have been ongoing since 2018. At that time, an elderly woman in Catalonia reported that she had been cheated out of 800,000 euros.

Victims were called from call centers in Albania, Ukraine and other countries.

They “pretended to be well versed in the world of finance.

They manipulated their victims with persuasion techniques and promised high profits.

Many would have trusted the gang and, above all, transferred ever larger sums for alleged transactions with cryptocurrencies.

The criminals often succeeded in installing remote access software on the victims' computers.

"We estimate that the gang earned around 400 euros per minute," it said.

But now it has been broken.

"They thought they could work with impunity, but now they got a nasty surprise," said a spokesman for the Guardia Civil.

Such spectacular cases occur again and again with digital currencies.

The Onecoin scam, which has meanwhile been widely processed in the media, is well known.

The self-proclaimed “crypto queen” Ruja Ignatova stole at least $4 billion at the time and is also on the FBI’s most wanted fugitives list.

No one knows exactly where she is.

There were always rumors that she would sail across the Mediterranean on a yacht.