A charismatic con man, a family designed to pretend, a virtual currency that is sinking, hundreds of scammed people and a group of gangsters wanting to kill him.
The last hours of Javier Biosca, the biggest cryptocurrency scammer in Spain, are those of an anguished man who no longer had a trace of the private plane, the Marbella mansion, the luxury cars, or the dozen escorts that arrived to have.
When on Tuesday at 11:15 in the morning Javier Biosca launched himself from the fifth floor of a hotel in Estepona, he was ending a career as an international
broker
as brief and irregular as the cryptocurrencies he handled.
His wife and his son regretted what had happened, but the hundreds of scammed first doubted that it was him and then, that it was a suicide.
During the year he played cryptocurrency guru, from March 2019 to fall 2020, combining fancy words like “blockchain”, “wallet” or “algorithm” with vulgar pyramid scheme techniques, he managed to fool hundreds of customers. , among whom there are lawyers, notaries or businessmen who lost between 10,000 and 50,000 euros, but also dangerous Russian and Romanian mobsters based in Marbella who demanded their money and with whom he would have met hours before jumping into the void, according to police sources consulted. by THE COUNTRY.
When he was buried this Friday in Estepona, only a small group of relatives attended the funeral.
There was his mother, his wife, an orphaned nephew and some of the few friends he had left to whom he owed neither money nor favors.
"At least the press didn't come"
says one of them with resignation, present at the burial.
Nobody wanted to open the coffin due to the state in which the body had been left and with some shovels of earth on the coffin the final point was put to a dizzying career that in a short time had gone from a town hardware store to wanting to buy a bank in Cabo Green.
Javier Biosca was born 50 years ago in Barcelona, where he lived until 2001, when he fell in love with Paloma Gallardo, a hairdresser from Toledo, with whom he went to live in Torrijos, a municipality with 10,000 inhabitants where he tried to set up a hardware store.
Shortly after, he went to live in Fuensalida, a nearby town of 13,000 inhabitants where he made commissioned web pages.
He began investing in bitcoin and perfecting what he called his robot, a computer program that allowed him to perform thousands of coin buying and selling operations simultaneously.
In 2019 he founded Algorithms Group in London, a firm dedicated to attracting small investors eager to jump on the cryptocurrency trend.
The first victims were 19 friends to whom he proposed three types of investments: bitcoin, the star of cryptocurrencies;
etherum,
the second with the largest capitalization;
and litecoin, a promising alternative to bitcoin.
Biosca presented himself as an expert capable of increasing investment between 20% and 25% each week.
When it began to operate in the summer of 2019, bitcoin had a value close to 10,000 euros.
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Hand in hand with his wife, described by the lawyer for those affected, Emilia Ceballos, as an "ambitious and manipulative person who made Javier what he wanted", the operations grew like foam and soon the 19 unsuspecting people became dozens and a year later there were already hundreds.
Biosca had hired four people who worked in public relations, attracting clients throughout Spain.
Among them were businessmen from Barcelona, notaries from Madrid, builders from Valencia or industrialists from Asturias who did not hesitate to take a private plane to close an investment and who were paid religiously during the first months.
But all three currencies began to lose value at a rate inversely proportional to the speed with which new customers arrived.
Profits could be recovered or reinvested just by sending a WhatsApp message.
A year later, payments began to slow down and soon after commissions fell: to 15%, to 10%, then to 8%... until at the end of 2020, Algorithms Group stopped paying its customers.
At that time the value of bitcoin was around 5,700 euros.
Luxury in Marbella
In the Toledo town of Torrijos nobody remembers him.
Dedicated to wine and livestock, with its baroque collegiate church, its Spanish flags on the balconies and its streets of "Spanish Gibraltar" and "Batalla del Ebro", the only international thing is the Moroccan emigrants that populate its streets and the Swiss Bar that sells coffees in front of the City Hall.
In the Avenida hardware store, the owner does not remember any colleague who became a millionaire and the only Biosca who passed through here was a representative of electrical material from Madrid.
In the south they remember him better.
A few months after starting to earn money, the Biosca family left their small house in Toledo and moved to a spectacular mansion in Marbella.
In the world of cryptocurrencies, appearance is as important as its value in the markets to position an unstable and questionable product.
He rented a mansion for which he paid 15,000 euros per month and paid a year in advance.
Later he rented several luxury vehicles for which he paid 3,000 euros per month to pretend a standard of living with which to impress his potential clients.
His tremendous parties were a sensation on the Costa del Sol. For his safety, he had four safe deposit boxes installed in the chalet and hired a team of 10 bodyguards, including former Spanish and Colombian police officers.
For a year,
money poured into the house, as investors from all over the country flowed into the mansion by private plane.
The money that passed through his hands was so great that Biosca started contacts to buy a bank in Cape Verde and another in Guinea Bissau.
When it was already a shouting secret that hundreds of people had lost their investments, those affected denounced the facts in March 2021 and the judge of the National Court, Santiago Pedraz decreed an international search and arrest warrant against Biosca for a rosary of crimes such as fraud, money laundering, misappropriation, false public document, money laundering and criminal organization.
The police took four months to capture him when, during a routine control in Nerja, he had to show his ID to the police.
Biosca spent eight months in jail, until March 2022, when a mysterious guarantor posted a bail of one million euros so that he could regain his freedom.
"Dandi, what a dandy you are," his lawyer told him at the prison gates as soon as he was released.
Biosca was actually a broken toy that had lost 20 kilos and had been beaten up in prison.
According to two people close to the family, the guarantor was actually a group of scammed people who, with his departure, wanted to force him to return the money through extortion and even a kidnapping reported to the Civil Guard.
When they realized that the money would never arrive, they withdrew the bail and the National Court ordered his imprisonment again in July 2022. “He was terrified of the idea of going back to jail or of being shot twice in the street ”, acknowledges a person close to Biosca.
The National Court accused him of an alleged fraud of 815 million euros,
"He lived in anguish for fear that the groups of Kosovars, Russians and Bulgarians whom he had defrauded would kill him," says the lawyer.
The association he heads considers that the money is still in the hands of his wife and his son.
"She was the one who handled the keys and the one who had access to the money," she insists.
The lawyer has pointed to Luis Monje, another of those investigated, whom she accuses of being Biosca's front man.
Monje, however, considers himself yet another scammed and clarifies that his closeness was due to his interest "in recovering 1.5 million euros," he explains from Seville.
"The lawyer for those affected does not say that she invested 50,000 euros in cash in bitcoins and the National Court itself has asked her to clarify the origin of the money," she adds.
The police sources consulted by EL PAÍS confirm that Monje was not in Estepona on the day of his death and point out, however, that hours before he met with local criminals.
What they told him or the kind of threats Biosca received are a mystery as big and deep as the cryptocurrencies he handled.