Leonardo Cositorto, the scammed scammer and where is the savers' money

Interpol knocks on the door of the Villa Rubén apart hotel, on the paradisiacal beach of Juan Dolio, Dominican Republic.

On the other side is

, escorted by his trusted evangelical pastor and one other person.

He calls Buenos Aires and talks to his lawyer.

The officers tell him that they are for something else, but in reality

they are looking for him

After almost a month on the run, the Córdoba Justice found him in that department just over 5,600 kilometers from Villa María, the town where he is accused of fraud.

They found him through the zooms he gave every night asking his followers for more money

 She gave him away a detail from the background.

In a black Hugo Boss shirt with bright fluorescent flowers, Interpol puts handcuffs on him for the first time.

He is stopped. 

That morning this Tuesday marks one year.

The Justice of Córdoba, Salta, Santa Fe and Corrientes accuse him - each one on their own - of leading an illegal association that launched a ponzi-type scheme that generated a scam of -at least- 120 million dollars. 

Leonardo Cositorto, who remained a fugitive from Justice, detained in the Dominican Republic.

This Tuesday marks one year of his fall.

That illicit association

It included

virtual reality metaverses, a gated community project, car sales, and even a burger joint, but had projects ranging from a fleet of air taxis to a pet store.

A rather particular business holding.

But

is much bigger than it seemed a little over a year ago, when it became a trend due to the unusual videos that went viral on social networks. 

During the time that the investigation takes, the different courts that analyze the traces of Cositorto and the other members linked to the company found other elements with international ramifications and money movements that could indicate money laundering.

Not just from Zoe's money, but as a service to other organizations. 

Anatomy of a scam

Generación Zoe is being investigated in Salta, Corrientes, Santa Fe, Córdoba and Buenos Aires, the districts where savers filed lawsuits.

In the first four,

The Buenos Aires cause, which includes complaints about the headquarters and the province of Buenos Aires, had little movement during the last year, although it had some progress in recent months.

But of all the causes, the most concrete is the one led in Córdoba by prosecutor Juliana Companys, from Villa María.

It was the first complaint against Zoe, the one that prompted the arrest of Cositorto and Maximiliano Batista (his number 2) through Interpol and the one with the largest number of defendants: 31.

It is that while the rest of the districts only targeted local leaders and Cositorto, Villa María went for the entire structure.

Among the detainees there are accountants, managers, intermediaries and promoters.

There is one more file, which is in the federal court of Ariel Lijo, and which

around the company's money movements.

Zoe's scheme was masked in a virtual school, which offered almost thirty courses that included coaching, finance, sports management, NLP or trading among others.

It started in Colombia in 2017, arrived in Argentina in 2019 and had a boom during the pandemic, when isolation locked up half the planet and everyone was looking for what to do with time at home.

Cositorto is investigated for fraud and illicit association.

He led a coaching school

The students paid money as a membership, which was used to enter the school.

But between 2020 and 2021, the company evolved and began to offer returns in dollars to those who pay for that membership.

With that hook, many students saw

Although there were victims of all kinds, many were people with black jobs, who had been left on the street and without income due to the Covid-19 crisis.

It was fertile ground for the needy. 

That entry membership religiously paid a fixed return of 7.5 percent in dollars per month, outrageous figures that no other investment can pay.

To put it in context, US treasury bonds (the most reliable investment in the finance universe) pay 2% in dollars per year.

The only investments that can afford those monthly margins are those with higher risk, such as stocks or cryptocurrencies, but none can guarantee a return of 7.5 per month.

For Justice, that is the proof that indicates that

a ponzi.

There were also other investment offers such as synthetic index robots or pins, some VIP memberships that gave returns of up to $1,200 a day for those who bought them. 

In Zoe they justified the returns by stating that they had found an algorithm developed by a trader named

, who could anticipate with amazing precision "where the market was going" and thus bet on insurance.

The Cordovan Justice never found a single proof that Zoe had made an investment with the money she received.

Rosa today is one of the two fugitives in the case.

The offices of Villa María, the place where the strongest investigation around Generación Zoe began.

The scheme began to fall apart in September 2021, when the money they had to pay for memberships was much higher than the new income.

There are audios of Cositorto asking the leaders

, since the payment scheme was unsustainable.

Within a few weeks the complaints would arrive on Twitter and the investigation in justice.

When the collapse began, the mountains of cash that savers carried began to disappear from the offices, according to the testimony of different sources to

. 

But in addition to the silver in the dark, there was a huge amount of deposits that moved between banks during the end of 2021. The question is what happened to those deposits

the african track

A few weeks ago,

published the story of the Futswap company, a digital fintech company with offices in the United Arab Emirates, Sweden and Estonia, which was linked to the Cositorto firm through former judge Luis Yrimia, legal director of

holding .

A video on Futswap's Instagram, filmed in January 2023, showed him dancing at a company corporate party, organized on top of a yacht on the beaches of Dubai.

Yrimia is the other fugitive from the Zoe case in Argentina.

From Futswap they denied any kind of connection with Yrimia and with Zoe Generation.

And they alleged a smear campaign against them in an email contact with the newspaper.

"Zoe requested one of our products, but no negotiation was completed precisely because they did not have the necessary stability and documentation," they said in a Twitter thread when asked by

.

On the Futswap website you can see the services they offer and the prepaid cards.

Futswap was mentioned by Yrimia in a video from November 2021, where she talks about a link that would allow Zoe to receive money from any country.

"That company is called Futswap by Zoe," narrates the fugitive.

But the company did not only appear on social networks.

A group of investigators following the case found more links between the Dubai firm and the Cositorto people.

It is a series of messages from a group of Zoe Generation leaders abroad, where Leonardo himself participates.

There, the trader asks the referrers to make transfers from the bank accounts that Zoe had in the different countries to an account located in a bank in Nigeria.

Specifically, it is the Zenith Bank PLC account ending in 07941 which, according to Cositorto in the messages, belongs to Futswap.

From there, the money loses track.

There are transfers from three different countries.

was able to check transfer receipts of up to $100,000 issued in October 2021, which leave accounts linked to Zoe and arrive at that bank located in Africa.

The $100,000 transfer receipt from a Zoe Generation account.

The recipient is a Futswap account, according to Cositorto

The researchers believe that this money was then transferred to USDT

a cryptocurrency that has a 1-to-1 parity with the dollar.

There are claims of losses of up to 2 million dollars in transfers made to that bank. 

But Zoe's links to Futswap keep coming up.

had access to a video that would have been recorded by Leonardo Cositorto from Colombia in September 2021, and that was sent to company leaders.

There he shows at least two boxes containing envelopes with dozens of debit cards.

On them appears the logo of one of the subdivisions of Futswap, which is responsible for issuing prepaid Visa cards.

"Well, leaders, we continue to receive cards. We have boxes of 10,000 dollars and boxes of 100,000 dollars. Here I just opened one and we have the Visa card that will also be used to later convert it and withdraw into Bitcoin. A big hug, I'm going

says Cositorto's voice, as he opens an envelope and takes out one of the cards.

They have no name, they just say the legend 'Futcard 100'.

One of Futswap's services consists of preloaded debit cards, which can be funded with money of any currency or in cryptocurrencies, to then make purchases around the world or withdraw cash.

The cards have limits of 10, 25 or up to 100 thousand dollars.

A few weeks later, Cositorto was handing out cards at a seminar in Argentina, according to video recorded by a participant.

"You can buy at any store, withdraw $450 a day at an ATM," he says, while holding the same envelope with what would be the Futswap logo.

The Futswap card held by Cositorto, with the company logo on the envelopes.

Videos of employees of the Buenos Aires offices are also circulating, showing on social networks the moment in which the cards with the Futswap inscription arrived.

One more detail.

When he was arrested in the Dominican Republic, in addition to the flowery Hugo Boss shirt, he had the Futswap card in his wallet that he showed in the presentation video.

Cositotorto, locked up

Cositorto's detractors recognize his tenacity.

It's just that even when he was in jail, he never sat still.

In that year that he has been detained, he launched a new company called All Us, a reversal of Zoe on a smaller scale and asking for just 6 dollars.

He denied the accusations and was merciless with the Justice of Córdoba.

He gave several interviews, in which he reaffirmed his desire to get into politics when he gets out of jail and even asked Javier Milei to shelter him in an intern at La Libertad Avanza.

Now he promises that, starting this week,

According to swears, in Zoe there was a breach of contract that began with a run caused by a campaign on social networks.

But according to complaints from other inmates, he also tried to escape on at least two other occasions.

The last one occurred the previous week, when an inmate denounced that Cositorto commented in the wards that he wanted to take advantage of a transfer request to Buenos Aires

The coach is affected by a pulmonary condition, a tumor similar to a nodule, almost four centimeters, was detected in the upper part of the left lung.

A puncture biopsy must be done, a study that takes just 15 minutes.

Cositorto insisted that it be done in Buenos Aires.

The Cordovan Justice requested a series of requirements before authorizing it.

Once he had the go-ahead, the complaint came from a prisoner.

Now, Cositorto's defense denies an escape attempt and says that the delay harms his health. 

However, the first of them is the one that aroused suspicions among the Justice.

It would have been in December, when a detainee promised him the possibility of leaving with a spectacular operation:

Bouwer prison to take him away, in the style of the Rosario drug lord Esteban Lindor Alvarado, whose plan was aborted in time. .

This film maneuver would have been proposed to him by a prisoner named "Brian", who was sentenced to a life sentence.

To finance the exit, according to sources close to the cause,

The day of the escape, the helicopter did not appear.

Neither the next day.

Scammed, he had no one to complain to.

The story, in addition to being picturesque, reveals a key fact for researchers.

They believe that Cositorto still has a wallet to bank these types of maneuvers. 

Where is the money,

a year later, is still the big question.

EMJ

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