Investor lawyer estimates the number of alleged victims at around 30,000 people.
The public prosecutor’s office in Vienna received another 23-page criminal complaint in the Causa Paraiba World on Wednesday. In it, serious allegations are made against six Austrians, one German and one Swiss in connection with alleged investments in crypto assets.
The public prosecutor’s office and the Vienna State Criminal Police Office are investigating on suspicion of serious commercial fraud and the operation of a prohibited pyramid scheme.
“The clients who are represented by me have an alleged damage of at least twelve million euros,” says the Viennese lawyer Jörg Zarbl to the KURIER.
Based on the documents available to him, he estimates the total number of people affected to be around 30,000. The individual damages are massive. “Yesterday a client got in touch who had invested 100,000 euros, another client 110,000 euros,” says the lawyer.
The offer from the Paraiba masterminds seemed tempting. Paraiba World is a kind of asset management that invests in cryptocurrencies and real estate. “Paraiba offers a 100% passive solution for those looking to profit from Cryptocurrency,” the self-promotion reads. “The company has seven highly qualified cryptocurrency traders. Paraiba World also operates worldwide.”
12.66 percent interest
“And from the allegedly great profits that are generated, interest is paid to the investors’ accounts from Thursday to Sunday,” Zarbl explains the system. As the KURIER already reported, an investor who invested 100,000 euros in the system was promised 12.66 interest per month. The payouts should be made using bitcoins. But the lawyer assumes that the Paraiba system is not financed from investment profits, but from deposits and withdrawals from investors. It’s just a pyramid game.
This assumption is also supported by the fact that Paraiba investors could also become so-called “active members” in order to recruit new investors. If you recruit new “customers”, you move up to a higher “pool” and collect, for example, 0.3 percent of the investment sum of the recruited person daily from 20 recruited persons.
“The higher the rank, the more interest you get because you participate in the deposits of everyone else who is below in the pyramid,” says Zarbl. At the top of this pyramid are said to be three Austrians who have now been reported. Back to the promised interest: “This interest has been credited to accounts at Unique Private Bank in the Comoros, a bank that actually doesn’t exist,” says the lawyer. “The investors who were in the system at the beginning received payments in the first year, but these gradually dried up and after two years they were completely stopped.”
The Paraiba system has now been shut down and, according to the German financial market regulator Bafin, the Paraiba values are said to have been exchanged for the “Trillant” crypto asset. A trillion is said to be worth 0.0002449 euros.