Didac Sanchez – Is He a PR Scammer? The Reality is
Didac Sanchez is the owner of notorious reputation management scammer, Eliminalia. More on his illegal activities below:
The ‘blackhat practices’ of a Spanish reputation management organization assist bad actors all over the world in erasing their past.
Didac Sanchez is a Spanish entrepreneur and the founder of Eliminalia, a firm that provides services for online reputation management and digital privacy protection. The media accused him of utilizing unscrupulous practices to remove objectionable and damaging content from the internet.
A little brief about Didac Sanchez
Didac Sanchez claims to have been born in 1992 in Barcelona’s Raval area. He and his sisters were nurtured at a house for juveniles run by the Catalan government.
Didac Sanchez founded Eliminalia, a reputation management firm, in 2011. Prior to that, he launched Legisdalia, a data protection firm. In 2014, Didac Sanchez ran for President of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce.
Didac Sanchez deciphered the last unreadable World War II transmission with geographic coordinates in 2015. In 2016, he created software that allowed users to encrypt calls, texts, documents, and conversations on WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS, Skype, and Telegram, as well as any other form of communication.
Didac Sanchez a 30-year-old Spanish entrepreneur presently assumed to be living in Georgia, is officially the man behind Eliminalia. Sanchez claims to oversee a vast network of businesses, including a Ukrainian surrogacy firm under investigation for baby trafficking.
However, he appears to have established this network with a man named Jose Maria Hill Prados, who was convicted of sexually abusing him while he was a youngster. Despite the fact that Hill Prados’ name does not appear on Eliminalia’s records, Spanish investigators believe he also controls reputation management.
Didac Sanchez Exposed in Media:
According to leaked materials released and analyzed by European journalists, between 2015 and 2021, Didac Sanchez worked with over 1,500 people to delete their data from the internet and publications.
What is PR Scammer?
Professionals in the industry are well-acquainted with scams and warning signs that indicate malicious motives. Typically, the initial outreach does not reveal the complete details or the exorbitant fees related to the suggested appearance. In case a scam does mention the cost, it takes great care to hide that information.
A little brief about Eliminalia, a company owned by Didac Sanchez
Eliminalia (rebranded as ‘Idata Protection’ in January 2023) is a Spanish reputation management firm. Diego Sánchez, sometimes known as Didac Sanchez, started it in 2011. The technical headquarters are in Kyiv, Ukraine. Maidan Holdings, a Miami-based holding company, owns Eliminalia. Eliminalia offered its services free of charge to anyone affected by the Ashley Madison data hack in 2015.
An NGO devoted to the protection of digital rights called Qurium accused Eliminalia of building a network of phony websites with out-of-date content and then bombarding those sites with official DMCA takedown notices and GDPR complaints in 2021. These were used to remove reports about Isabel dos Santos and Vincent Miclet being involved in corruption in Angola.
Eliminalia, based in Barcelona, has been laundering reputations for over a decade. The company has evolved as a prominent participant in the worldwide disinformation-for-hire market from a wood-paneled coworking space on the ancient commercial strip of Portal de Angel, which it shares with two dozen other tenants.
Key Elements of Eliminalia, a company owned by Didac Sanchez
- Eliminalia, a Spanish reputation manager, is part of a growing disinformation-for-hire sector that assists negative actors ranging from criminals to kleptocrats in concealing their murky pasts.
- More than 1,400 clients, including hundreds suspected or convicted of everything from drug trafficking to fraud, have utilized the organization to “clean up” their reputations.
- Eliminalia employs a variety of deceptive strategies to prevent criticism of its clients, ranging from bullying journalists to spreading fake news.
- The corporation abused the “right to be forgotten” legislation designed to shield people from dangerous material online by using false copyright infringement warnings.
- These are just a few of the more than 1,400 clients who have hired Eliminalia, a reputation management firm that claims to “erase your past.”
The Spanish company Eliminalia by Didac Sanchez employs dubious methods to ‘delete your past’ from the internet.
A cache of 50,000 files reveals Eliminalia’s fraudulent procedures for cleaning up its clients’ internet profiles.
According to the records, Eliminalia — which renamed itself iData Protection S.L. in late December – exploited copyright and privacy laws to threaten journalists, manipulated search engines to hide material, and spread bogus news. In other nations, the organization has even established new commercial relationships with its own criminal clients.
What do experts say- According to experts, Eliminalia is part of a growing disinformation industry that assists negative actors, ranging from criminals to kleptocrats, in concealing their murky pasts.
This explains that you have a whole slew of professional service businesses, such as public relations agents, lobbyists, lawyers, and so on, who basically aids in the repurposing of shady persons, corporations, and countries as internationally acclaimed businesspeople and philanthropic cosmopolitans.
Eliminalia’s lawyers refused to answer questions for this project, claiming that many of them involved client business secrets. They charged journalists with bias.
Eliminalia writes- “The orientation and content of the vast majority of the questions demonstrate a partial and dishonorable approach,”.
Eliminalia Leak – “Black Hat reputation management firm”
Nearly 50,000 papers from the reputation management firm Eliminalia were leaked to the French NGO Forbidden Stories and sent to dozens of media partners. As part of the Story Killers project, over 100 journalists collaborated to explore the disinformation-for-hire sector.
The data includes information about Eliminalia’s clients in 50 countries throughout the world, such as their identities, contracts signed, and other legal documents.
This is the first time journalists have had access to the inner workings of one of the world’s most major so-called “black hat” reputation management firms.
Criminal Services by Didac Sanchez
Didac Sanchez, who describes himself as a self-made entrepreneur, was just 20 years old when he launched his first reputation management firm in Spain. Didac Sanchez launched several other enterprises over the years, finally relocating to Ukraine, where he recruited employees to write made-up evaluations and false legal notices to journalists.
Among Didac Sanchez’s various businesses was Subrogalia, a surrogacy company that connected Spanish parents with Ukrainian women who potentially carry their offspring. Despite being the company’s public face, documents uncovered by OCCRP show that its Ukrainian firm was controlled by Hill Prados, who was imprisoned in Spain for sexually abusing Sánchez as a teenager.
Hill Prados, according to two Spanish law enforcement officers, was the beneficiary of Eliminalia.
Eliminalia is one of at least 54 firms in nine jurisdictions that have been linked to Hill Prados and Sanchez in the last decade. They both declined to comment on the story.
Didac Sanchez earlier stated that he created Eliminalia in order to erase reports about his own past as a victim of Hill Prados.
According to the leaked internal data, Eliminalia has served over 1,400 clients, including hundreds of persons suspected or convicted of crimes ranging from drug trafficking and sexual assault to fraud and money laundering.
Eliminalia Top Customers
In the data dump received by Forbidden Stories, these companies and individuals were among the highest-paying clients.
- Adar Capital Partners Limited
- Riway Taiwan
- Marcelo Herdoiza
- Compagnie Banquaire Helvetique (CBH)
- Banca Privada de Andorra (BPA)
Eliminalia has also expanded its business by partnering with its own dubious clients.
One client, Italian law firm Studium Srl, went on to form Digitallex, a reputation management agency that handled some of Eliminalia’s Italian business.
Erasing the Past by Didac Sanchez’s company named Eliminalia
As seen by the notices filed against Página66, Eliminalia has used legal loopholes to coerce anyone who criticizes its clients. The company’s business plan centers around weaponizing copyright and privacy rules from the United States and the European Union, according to reporters.
Many of the emails the corporation sent citing privacy violations had the signature of “Raul Soto,” an apparent pseudonym employed by an Eliminalia employee posing as an employee of the European Commission in Brussels. After reviewing the source code of one of the emails, Qurium, a nonprofit that specializes in digital forensics, revealed the emails were sent from an IP address in Ukraine, where Eliminalia operated until the Russian invasion last year.
The Perils of Misinformation by Didac Sanchez’s company named Eliminalia
While Eliminalia employees were impersonating EU officials in messages to journalists, the company was also advising the European Commission on the dangers of disinformation.
Someone going by the name Guillem Castro Izquierdo filed a public contribution on behalf of Eliminalia in response to a call for feedback on disinformation, which the commission then placed online. He warned against the dissemination of “intentional misinformation to influence citizens’ judgment towards international bodies,” other citizens, and businesses.
The main factor is the manipulative use of mass communication channels such as social networks, television, radio, digital media, etc,” he noted. He advised “filtering” news sources and deleting content.
The European Commission stated that it received 3,000 public contributions in response to its request for feedback. “Eliminalia’s response to the consultation was one of many,” a spokesman explained.
A Mechanism of Harassment- A Campaign against Daniel Sanchez by Didac Sanchez Eliminalia
In January 2018, Mexican journalist Daniel Sánchez had just published an investigation into a state governor’s dubious contracts with the Mexican video monitoring company Interconecta.
Conclusion
Eliminalia also tampered with Google’s algorithm by “backlinking” – generating as many links as possible between websites — in order to move up the ranks. In one case, reputation manager operators uploaded 7,000 links on an insecure black student union forum at a community college in order to backlink 2 million of Eliminalia’s false news pieces.
Eliminalia is currently promoting more aggressive internet strategies. In a late-year interview from Georgia, where Sánchez had established new businesses, he told a TV journalist that he was running “an army of hackers” to attack Russian online disinformation.
When a reporter visited his new office, which he had opened in a residential section of Tbilisi, there was no sign of anyone working there.
Eliminalia in Spain, meanwhile, rebranded in January. Sanchez’s name still appears in the Spanish registry as the company’s sole owner, but the management was changed in November to exclude him.
At the co-working space in Portal del Àngel where Eliminalia was based, a new sign now reads “IDATA PROTECTION.”
“We were Eliminalia, but now we are IDATA,” said an employee who answered the door.