More than 400 Colombians denounced the Karatbars company for suffering a scam in an investment in cryptocurrencies. The company arrived in the country in 2019 and from that moment began the delivery of “credit cards with the Mastercard logo” by its CEO Harald Seiz.

The amount of the scam is valued at 400 thousand dollars, which is equivalent to 1,500 million Colombian pesos. Among the scammed citizens are different professions such as doctors, lawyers, investment engineers and “high-profile” politicians from Colombia, who deny having received no “dividend” to date.

However, Harald Seiz’s defense attorneys allegue that all the “infrastructure of the company when it arrived in Colombia, such as computers, cell phones, and even mini gold bars are being held at customs during the legal process and that is why it has not been able to pay off debts.”

The Karatbars company has also been accused in other countries such as the United Kingdom, New Zealand and South Africa, where it implemented the pyramid model and investors have not been able to get their money back.

Regulatory entities in these countries have stated that the company does not have the necessary perisology to carry out financial activities, this was announced last May by the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) which warned that “Karatbars International GmbH, Karatbit Foundation, Freebay and associated companies are not registered as financial service providers.”

Other institutions such as “The Federal Financial Supervisory Authority of Germany (BaFin), the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) of South Africa, the British Columbia Securities Commission, the Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF) Quebec and the Bank of Namibia (BoN)” have also settled complaints to the company.

Cryptocurrency scams have increased in Latin America. One of the most recent cases occurred in Venezuela when Andrés Jesús Dos Santos Hernández was captured by the authorities for allegedly faking his own kidnapping to withdraw 1,150,000 dollars from Binance.

M. Rodríguez

Source: beincrypto

La entrada German company involved in crypto scam to Colombians apareció primero en Bitfinance.