Behind the false interviews with Elise Lucet and Jamel Debbouze, the funding rip-off mafias | EUROtoday

On the telephone, Jérôme Legrand was at all times charming. Punctual, variety, talking in excellent French, the consultant of ICMarket Trading, in London, “inspired great confidence”recollects Louise D. She and her husband had been victims of a faux funding rip-off, a supposedly new methodology for speculating on cryptocurrencies because of a revolutionary software. “We first paid 250 euros to get started, and everything was going well: very quickly, we saw that the value of the investment was increasing. Jérôme then asked us if we had financial possibilities; he told us that we would have to invest 10,000 euros, then he advised us to pay 15,000 euros instead. »

The couple followed his advice and sent several transfers, for a total of 15,000 euros. According to the nice charts on the ICMarket Trading app, they got a great deal: “We found ourselves out of 52,284 euros, and we wanted to recover part of the money. This is where things went wrong. » Their investment is in cryptocurrencies, explains to them, always kindly, “Jerome” : they have to subsequently be exchanged for euros, and this has a price, a “flat tax” by 30%. And 11,000 euros to get all the pieces again is an excessive amount of: the couple decides to withdraw 10,000 euros from their funding and subsequently sends a brand new switch of three,000 euros, nonetheless to the identical financial institution, in Lithuania.

“There, our bank showed upcontinues Louise. They called us saying that we had made a lot of large transfers abroad and that they advised us to be careful. We were too confident, we agreed to sign a waiver”, requested by the financial institution to make the switch. The couple goes on trip for per week. On the way in which again, Jérôme Legrand, a false title, disappeared: “It was the great silence. No more way to contact him, account blocked on the application, no phone number answered… It was over. » Louise and her husband lost 18,250 euros. “We know very well that we will never see them again”she sighs.

The couple is way from being the one one to have suffered from these very efficient scams which function because of an enormous ecosystem of specialised intermediaries working for felony buildings. The cybersecurity firm Group-IB, which has been following the actions of a felony group working the sort of rip-off geared toward France and Belgium for six years, believes that the group in query was in a position to steal, alone, virtually 500 million euros.

You have 87.74% of this text left to learn. The relaxation is reserved for subscribers.