Alex Trelinski
SPAIN’S first-ever class action involving crypto-currency fraud has been presented to the National Court in Madrid.
The lawsuit claims that over 300 small crypto investors were ripped off to the tune of over €250 million by Javier Biosca Rodriquez.
Papers filed to the court last month say that Biosca created a scheme in 2019 which offered clients weekly returns of up to 25% on their crypto investments.
He concentrated on getting bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin with the money provided from his clients.
The first group consisted of 19 people, who were acquaintances of Biosca.
The promised dividends were paid out and Biosca’s client base then expanded to over 500 through word of mouth.
His investors included notaries, judges, tax inspectors, and small business owners.
But in January 2020, the weekly payout dropped to between 8 and 10%, and the dividends totally dried up by last November.
Biosca told investors that he was in charge of a brokerage company called Algorithms Group, but it was not registered with the Spanish National Securities Markets Commission.
Emilia Zaballos is the president of the Association of People Affected by Cryptocurrency Investors (AAIC), as well as the lawyer handling the case.
Zaballos said:-” The number of victims we are hearing about keeps rising every day and though we have filed for damages of €250 million, the final value of the con could be over €3 billion depending on crypto-currency values.”
She added that besides Biosca, the lawsuit covers his wife Paloma and his older son Sergio.
It accuses them of scamming and other crimes such as ‘ misappropriation, receipt and money laundering, illicit association, crimes against the public treasury, bribery, corporate crimes, concealment and falsification in a public document’.
Emilia Zaballos said that Javier Biosca Rodriquez carried out all of the transactions on a home computer with no other back-up infrastructure.
The Biosca case is not the only one that the National Court is set to look at in the world of crypto-currencies.
A class action involving defrauded Spanish investors in the Kuailian platform is also in the pipeline.
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