The chubby young man in thick-rimmed glasses was also gaining a taste for the high life, police and prosecutors said.
Dos Santos bought expensive jewelry and a swanky apartment as contracts poured in from elsewhere in Latin America and as far away as the U.S., Europe and the Gulf.
Jéfferson Colombo, a cryptofinance researcher at Sao Paulo´s Getulio Vargas Foundation, said religious groups are often targeted by pyramid schemers.
“It´s through contacts that you increase the base of the pyramid,” he said.
In and around Cabo Frio, where some had seen their friends and neighbors reap rewards by investing their life savings in the cryptocurrency investment firm G.A.S Consulting & Technology, many began to fear the cost of missing out. Brazil became one of the first countries in the world to approve Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, second only to Canada. (AP Photo/Bruna Prado)” class=”blkBorder img-share” style=”max-width:100%” />
Bathers dive into the waters of Fort Beach in Cabo Frio, Brazil, Wednesday, Dec.
15, 2021. Brazil became one of the first countries in the world to approve Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, second only to Canada.
history in the 1920s was buried in a public Rio cemetery with his last $75. In Cabo Frio, dos Santos’ success inspired other budding entrepreneurs to follow in his footsteps – not to mention those of Charles Ponzi, who died nearby in a Rio de Janeiro hospital charity ward in 1949.
The Italian immigrant who engineered one of the largest scams in U.S.
Then his therapist told him he sold his house to invest in G.A.S., and had been receiving 10% monthly returns for a year. Do Carmo invested 40,000 reais ($7,000) – just over half the money left in his retirement fund.
Police say the company owned by 38-year-old Glaidson Acácio dos Santos had total transactions worth at least $7 billion ($38 billion reais) from 2015 through mid-2021 as part of a Bitcoin-based Ponzi scheme that promised investors 10% monthly returns.
Rio state police have also linked two attempted killings to dos Santos and what they called his “extermination 币安交易所 team.” On March 20, a trader known as Nilsinho was shot while driving his BMW through Cabo Frio.
He was severely injured but survived. Three months later another firm´s operator was targeted, his car hit by 40 bullets; he also survived.
Police accuse dos Santos of ordering the hit. Less than four months later, on Aug.
4, Wesley Pessano, who advertised himself on social media as a cryptocurrency trader, was shot dead in his Porsche.
Police say dos Santos began trading in Bitcoin after leaving his job as a waiter in 2014.
A one-time evangelical preacher in training, he enlisted clients from the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, Brazil´s largest neo-Pentecostal group, who earned a referral fee for bringing in fresh recruits and kicking back money to G.A.S., police documents say.
CABO FRIO, Brazil (AP) – In April, Brazil’s federal police stormed the helipad of a boutique seaside hotel in Rio de Janeiro state, where they busted two men and a woman loading a chopper with 7 million reais ($1.3 million) in neatly packed bills.
That year his company´s transactions totaled nearly 10 million reais ($1.8 million), 15 times higher than the previous year as money siphoned in and out of his bank accounts from all over Brazil, according to a federal police report.
The country´s financial intelligence unit also noticed the company – at the time registered as a restaurant – was regularly trading cryptocurrency on online exchange platforms. By 2017, dos Santos was starting to make serious money – and attract authorities’ attention.
The detainees told police they worked for G.A.S.
Consulting & Technology, a cryptocurrency investment firm founded by a former waiter-turned-multimillionaire who is the central figure in what is alleged to be one of Brazil´s biggest-ever pyramid schemes.
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