Retired woman loses R$ 37 million in fake investment platform scheme; Brazilian police target 18 suspects

Brazilian police have launched an operation in Gravataí, in the Porto Alegre metropolitan region, and in São Paulo and Santos, targeting a fraud network that allegedly used a fake investment platform to drain R$ 37 million from a retired woman. For PSPs and acquirers, the interesting bit is not the costume drama; it is the payment path, with crypto-asset businesses and bank accounts apparently used to move the money.

1. Police executed 10 preventive arrest warrants and 16 search-and-seizure warrants. In total, 18 people are targeted by the operation, and 8 of them are subject to precautionary measures other than detention. By 7h, two suspects had been arrested.
2. Among those targeted for arrest are three owners of companies that work with crypto-asset movement, through which the money is said to have passed. Police say the suspects posed as employees of a company identified as TDASX, which shut down after the investigations began. g1 said it tried to contact the people responsible for TDASX but had not found them by the latest update.
3. According to Eibert Moreira Neto, director of the State Department for Repression of Cybercrimes (DERCC), the aim is to break the scheme by going after the leadership as well as the operational layer. As he put it: "Our operation seeks to hit not only the operational layer of the scheme, which is made up of people who induce the victim to make a mistake, but also the upper layer, which provides the means for the crime to happen."
4. The scam followed the usual pig butchering pattern: the victim was added to messaging groups that mimicked legitimate communities focused on study and investments in the financial market. Inside those groups, supposed specialists, assistants and other participants coordinated their messages to create a professional and safe appearance, showed market analyses and apparently positive results, and persuaded the victim to keep increasing deposits.
5. When the retired woman tried to withdraw the funds, the withdrawals were allegedly blocked. After that came a new round of demands framed as fees, taxes or amounts needed to release the money, which kept the victim sending more transfers in an attempt to recover what had already been invested. Police identified at least 140 potential victims in digital environments linked to the same pattern, plus records of similar fraud tied to the financial structures under investigation.

One detail that matters for anyone watching bank and PSP exposure: a manager at a traditional Brazilian bank is among those targeted for arrest. Police said this followed a finding that, of the first 25 corporate recipients of the amounts transferred by the main victim, 24 had accounts in the same banking system.