Twenty people have been arrested by Spanish police because of their involvement with a Ponzi scheme featuring the unete cryptocurrency.

The arrests took place in seven different towns all over the country, according to El País, but the supposed facilitators of the scheme, 41-year-old José Manuel Ramírez Marco and his girlfriend Pilar Otero, were not seized. According to the police, the couple is somewhere in Europe and might be arrested in a few days.

In 2013, Ramírez Marco established the company Unetenet, claiming he created a new digital currency unete. Many journalists compare unete to bitcoin. Euro Weekly News call it “Spain’s answer to the bitcoin”, Spanish version of El País speaks of “José Manuel’s ‘bitcoin’” and the English version of the same newspaper speaks about a “Spanish bitcoin scam”. However, it seems that the unete had nothing in common with the bitcoin. It was just a fake: there was no blockchain of any kind, and the unete was just a kind of token sold by Ramírez Marco 1$ apiece. The Unetenet site promises a lot of possibilities but says nothing specific.

Lured by Ramírez Marco’s promises of quick wealth, by lavish celebrations he organised and by his personal charisma, more than 50,000 investors reportedly used their savings to buy unetes. They were paid special bonuses if they managed to bring more investors. In total, according to preliminary data, €50 million was stolen by the scammers. The funds went to the offshore zone of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and then flowed to Latvian, Maltese and Rumanian bank accounts.

It was the closure of Ramírez Marco’s Latvian bank account in 2014 that precipitated the fall of the unete. The company stopped paying bonuses to its investors who eventually started legal action against Unetenet.

Overall, the scam looks very similar to the MyCoin story that took place in early 2015 and was followed by CoinFox in detail. A self-styled “leading global Bitcoin trading platform and application service provider” unexpectedly closed in January, leaving its investors outraged, with a total loss of $8 million (at first journalists reported the sum of $300 million). Many politicians saw the case of MyCoin as a proof of bitcoin’s danger.

However, in reality MyCoin was just a Ponzi scheme disguised as a bitcoin trading platform. Indeed, the investors were promised exaggerated returns on their investments and special prizes like a Mercedes Benz if they found new customers. Later on, finding new customers became a prerequisite for getting the invested money back. And the fall of that company was all but unexpected.

Alexey Tereshchenko