María (fictitious name to preserve her anonymity) met her scammer through a friend. The proposal seemed simple: a monitor (or coach, as they usually call themselves in the world of finance) offered her to invest her money in stock market assets in exchange for her profits increasing. She only had to keep passing him the amounts of money he asked for, and he would periodically inform her of how the investments were progressing. In total, she handed over 13,000 euros between October 2021 and March 2022.
At first, nothing seemed to indicate that that man, with whom she met in person before starting the supposed investment, was going to end up submerging her in a judicial process of several years to recover her money. "He was praising himself, saying he knew a lot about the subject and boasting that he had bought a high-end car and that he was always traveling", María explains during a conversation with La Voz, who now sees all those details as symptoms that she was facing a scammer.
Upon starting these supposed investments, the scammer handed him/her his/her identity document and a contract, also assured him/her that he only worked with people "of trust" and created an environment in which the victim felt special, making it seem, "that he did not work with just anyone".
"He told me it was growing, shortly after he told me there was an opportunity and I put in more money," he tells this outlet. At the same time, his scammer sent him the link to a trading application from which he was supposed to be able to follow his investment, but in reality that was just a demo to practice with fictitious money and had nothing to do with what he was promising him.
Her scammer ended up giving her a history with the movements of her money and held online meetings with her to explain the earnings and percentages. "Some percentages that now with distance I see are impossible, an investment cannot go up so quickly", she adds. Those meetings became less frequent each time and her scammer kept putting her off every time she requested information about her money.
In total, of the 13,000 euros she gave him, María was able to recover just over 6,100 euros. María found out through her friend, the one who had put her in contact with her scammer, that everything was a scam, and then she managed to get him to return part of the money. When she assimilated that she had been scammed, she filed a complaint in March 2023 with the Civil Guard Command of Costa Teguise.
In March 2025, Criminal Court number 6 sentenced S.S.C. to nine months in prison, disqualification from exercising passive suffrage during the term of the sentence, and the payment of legal costs. At that hearing, an agreement was reached with the swindler. Furthermore, the court ordered him to compensate the victim with almost 7,000 euros for being responsible for a fraud offense. To date, one year after that court ruling, María has received 2,900 euros, which means she still has 4,100 euros left to recover.
This scam not only posed an economic problem for María, but also affected her health. "I started to feel bad, distressed, with anxiety, I went to the doctor because I was practically depressed and I started taking medication because I wasn't having a very good time," she recounts. She and her friend individually reported their scammer, but they are not the only ones who have been scammed by him.
Given this type of profiles, María recommends to other people not to hand over their savings to invest. "You have to be very awake to manipulations and investments do not have such significant growths of 20%, of 15%, of 30%, of 50%, which he told me, it's nonsense," she explains.
Finally, advises paying attention to details such as being a person who constantly boasts about their material possessions and asking for "documentation, address and domicile" before handing over the money to another person.
