Spanish crypto scammer: On Tuesday November 22, Javier Biosca threw himself from the fifth floor balcony of a hotel in Estepona, Spain. His suicide ended a brief and volatile career that saw him rise from being a failed hardware store owner to one of Spain’s most notorious and successful crypto scammers.
From March 2019 through to mid-2020, Biosca swindled more than 300 high profile clients including lawyers, politicians, businessman, and most notably, a number of Russian, Bulgarian and Romanian mobsters who lived in Spain’s southernmost region, Andalusia. In total, Biosca’s operation saw more than 100 million euros extracted from unlucky investors.
Biosca’s Tour de Fraud, began in early 2019 with the founding of the cryptocurrency ‘investment firm’ Algorithms Group. Biosca, positioning himself as a Bitcoin and cryptocurrency expert, promised new investors in the company a whopping 25% per week in gains on a series of strategic investments made in three main cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Litecoin (LTC).
In the beginning, Biosca’s ambitious scheme paid off. Investors saw rapid gains in their portfolios as the price of Bitcoin grew substantially through the latter half of 2019. His personal success was highly visible from the outside as well. In Marbella, a town in the south of Spain, Biosca and his family were well-known for their lavish lifestyle. The Bioscas reportedly paid around US$15,000 a month to rent for a sprawling mansion, owned a number of luxury cars and even leased a private jet.
Spanish crypto scammer: Parties
Biosca also threw massive parties that drew wealthy guests who stayed along the picturesque Costa del Sol. He also reportedly hired a team of bodyguards including former Spanish and Colombian police officers to protect the elite partygoers.
Like many things in crypto, what goes up quickly typically comes down just as fast. With the falling price of cryptocurrency in early 2020 combined with a breakdown of the “automated trading systems” he used, investor returns began to dwindle and staff began complaining of significant delays in the payment of their salaries.
Come March 2021, a number of Biosca’s disgruntled clients, realising that they’d been swindled, filed a series of legal complains in Spanish court. Judge Santiago Pedraz issued a warrant for Biosca’s arrest, citing fraud, money-laundering and forgery as the primary charges on a long list of criminal allegations.
According to a report from Spanish newspaper El País, Spanish police confirmed that every single person that Biosca managed to lure into his fraudulent scheme each lost a minimum of US$52,000.
In July of 2021, Spanish police captured Biosca. He was sentenced to eight months in jail. However, in March 2022 his prison sentence was cut short when a mysterious benefactor posted his bail of US$1 million.
Attorney Emilia Ceballos, charged with representing the investors that lost big in the fraudulent operation said that Biosca “lived in anguish that the Russian and Bulgarian gangsters whom he had defrauded would kill him.”
The Spanish National Court tallied that his fraudulent scheme still owed approximately US$814 million to investors, with many of the Russia-linked criminal organisations hot on his trial.
A growing list of mysteriously timed crypto deaths
Biosca’s death comes amidst a slew of other notable cryptocurrency elites also suffering similar fates. Most recently on November 25, Russian crypto billionaire Vyacheslav Taran died when his helicopter mysteriously crashed in good weather in France.
Two days before on November 23rd, 30-year-old Tiantian Kullander, the co-founder of cryptocurrency trading platform Amber Group, died in his sleep from “unknown causes”. The crypto community were quick to point out that sudden death during one’s sleep — especially for Kullander, who was known to be in good health — is ‘statistically uncommon‘ to say the least.
Weeks before this, prominent crypto developer Nikolai Mushegian, most well-known for as the co-founder of MakerDAO and the stablecoin DAI, was found dead in the water off the coast of Puerto Rico. His death came just days after the crypto developer posted a strange tweet from his anonymous account, claiming that the CIA and Mossad (Israel’s intelligence agency) were running a “sex trafficking blackmail ring” out of Puerto Rico and planned to “torture him to death”.
