Illegal gambling money laundering in Buenos Aires: a judicial officer in custody and the virtual wallet trail

A two-year investigation in Buenos Aires Province has now put a judicial officer in custody and started to map how virtual wallets were allegedly used to move money from illegal gambling. For PSPs and acquirers, the important part is the mechanism: real people’s identities, biometric enrollment, and payment rails that can be opened without the account holder fully understanding what they are signing up for.

1. Authorities say the scheme involved opening accounts in the names of real people, using their real data, and then using those accounts to move millions from illegal gambling in Buenos Aires Province. The people named on the accounts were often not aware of what was being done with their identity.
2. To get biometric access to those accounts, the group allegedly summoned people to take facial photos or scan their eyes. Many of them had criminal cases and were required to appear before the Patronato de Liberados as part of their judicial status. They were told the photos were for their digital file.
3. The data pool was large: Buenos Aires Province has 66,000 prisoners and more than 30,000 people under different forms of parole. Their full data is available through the Office of Coordination of the Prosecutor General’s Office with the Patronato de Liberados, where Albertina Mangini, the now-detained judicial officer, worked.
4. Mangini was detained along with two men and three other defendants in a case investigated by prosecutor Betina Lacki, the same prosecutor who uncovered the fake payroll scheme tied to “Chocolate” in the Buenos Aires legislature. In the same case, Ignacio Marchioni was also detained; he had previously been charged in the Sur Finanzas case involving financier Ariel Vallejo, whose business was linked to “Chiqui” Tapia and that had “helped” football clubs at the AFA’s direction.
5. That federal case also centered on virtual wallets reviewed by control bodies such as ARCA and Procelac. A senior source in La Plata told Clarín that whether the gambling proceeds in Buenos Aires Province later fed those football-related funds is “a probable hypothesis, which will be analyzed.”

The case started in the basement of the criminal prosecutors’ office in La Plata, on Calle 7, where a man was heard shouting that “they were not going to get him into any trouble.” He said Mangini was pressuring him to open a virtual account. Police later seized Mangini’s iPhone, but it was never unlocked. The investigation then moved on to a cleaning worker at the courts, who said she was offered 80,000 pesos to have her face photographed “at the bar across the street”; when she arrived, she found around 30 other people already queued for the same thing.