The Steinkeller Brothers are a family of traders that rose to fame as a result of their participation in the famous One Coin Ponzi Scheme, which brought in $4 billion. The scheme’s top earners included Stephan, Aron, and Christian Steinkeller. Based on One Coin-related claims, they were indicted in Italy in 2021. I can reveal more information about their con. So let’s continue exploring more information.
You can help us put a stop to online scams before they grow too big and end up ruining thousands of lives. A scam is a scam, doesn’t matter if it’s big or small. Now that this is out of the way, let’s get started with the review.
The Steinkeller Brothers: One Coin Ponzi Scheme
The Italian Guardia di Finanza has charged 14 people with promoting the One Coin Ponzi scheme. Bolzano, a city in the South Tyrol region of Italy, is where the indictments were submitted. Unfortunately, the identities of the individuals accused have not been made public.
How exactly does a Ponzi scheme operate?
An investment fraud known as a Ponzi scheme draws investors with claims of great returns and no risk but fails to invest the money as stated. Instead, it pays off earlier investors with money from future investors while maybe keeping a portion of the profits. These schemes typically fail when recruiting investors becomes challenging or when multiple investors attempt to cash out. They depend on a steady flow of new buyers to operate. They are called after Charles Ponzi, who ran a similar scam using postal stamps in the 1920s.
What I do know is that the suspects have been accused of:
Crimes of aggravated fraud, unlawful distribution, promotion, and pyramid selling of electronic money, illegal savings gathering, and financial crime—all with the aggravating circumstance of transnationality.
Authorities in Italy have identified about 3700 OneCoin victims in South Tyrol who collectively lost more than 5 million euros.
I also understand that the Steinkeller brothers, who “assisted” OneCoin founder Ruja Ignatova, were the main subject of the Guardia di Finanza’s investigation.
Soon after OneCoin’s collapse in early 2017, Christian, Aron, and Stephan Steinkeller stopped using it.
The brothers oversaw the “One DreamTeam” Onecoin network of promoters, which at the time brought in about $2.5 million a month.
Planet Impact, an MLM opportunity with an environmental focus, was the return of the Steinkeller Brothers in late 2019.
Planet Impact, an opportunity with an environmental theme from the Steinkeller Brothers, made a comeback in late 2019. While Planet Impact’s website is still active, its official Facebook page was shut down in April 2020.
The Steinkeller Brothers, who had been promoting OneCoin, escaped to Dubai after abandoning OneCoin. An extradition agreement between Italy and Dubai does not exist.
Dubai is presently the global hub for MLM fraud for all of these reasons and more. For MLM fraudsters who are evading the police, the city serves as a haven.
Late in 2016, Italy started to crack down on OneCoin. The AGCM issued an injunction just before the new year, effectively outlawing the promotion of OneCoin in Italy.
OneCoin was branded a pyramid scheme and outright outlawed in Italy in February 2017. The main Italian OneCoin group’s leaders, the Steinkeller brothers, gave up on the con three months later and left.
The AGCM penalized OneCoin 2.5 million euros in August 2017 for breaking the prohibition.
Following the OneCoin era of the Steinkeller brothers and Stefan Liback’s subsequent misuse of their downline, Luca Miatton assumed leadership of OneCoin in Italy.
Miatton has a history of lying while promoting OneCoin.
Miatton was exposed as a liar in April 2020 regarding a purported cooperation between OneCoin and Soldo for prepaid MasterCards.
Miatton was once more exposed for lying regarding the collaboration between OneCoin and the Ukrainian government in May 2021.
The Steinkellar Brothers: Shady Tactics and Connections with the Eliminalia
Aron, Stephan, and Christian Steinkeller have been identified as Eliminalia’s clients. The Steinkeller brothers are a family of businessmen.
Eliminalia has a terrible reputation for using a shady method to “erase” the past of its clients. A leaked document that Forbidden Stories was able to obtain revealed that the Steinkeller Brothers were Eliminalia customers.
It’s a good thing that the Steinkeller Brothers or Eliminalia didn’t turn to torture or killing. Threats and manipulation were used instead to target media coverage of their illicit activities. In the renowned One Coin Ponzi Scheme, which netted $4 billion, the Steinkeller brothers were among the top earners.
Through “One Dream Team” branding, the Steinkeller brothers spread the word about the hoax. The Steinkeller brothers were charged in Italy in 2021 on One Coin-related allegations, according to news reports. Eliminalia received $38,000 in the same year from a fictitious firm acting on the Steinkellers’ behalf.
According to Forbidden Story, Eliminalia employs the following strategies:
- abuse of GDPR regulations, posing as European Union representatives, and
- submitting false DMCA claims (backed up by made-up, old articles)
Forbidden Stories asserts that between 2015 and 2021, Eliminia effectively erased articles from “hundreds of journalists” based on the data they’ve examined.
Eliminalia asserts that its services help customers with the “right to be forgotten” get rid of “unwanted and inaccurate information,” however nearly 50,000 internal company records that were leaked to Forbidden Stories refute this assertion.
The documents demonstrate how Eliminalia concealed information of public importance while working for fraudsters, spyware providers, torturers, convicted felons, dishonest politicians, and others in the international underworld.
Previous reports, notably that by Rest of the World, named some of Eliminalia’s clients; but, this leak, which contains private emails, client names, contracts, and other legal papers, provides a more thorough knowledge of the company’s operations.
The ineffective DMCA laws and the well-intended but idiotic European GDPR laws allow organizations like Eliminalia to operate as they do.
Eliminalia and other businesses discovered that data protection regulations may be used as a weapon to delete information from the internet. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and GDPR are two rules that may be readily broken.
If you’re curious about whether BehindMLM was the target of the Steinkeller Brothers and Eliminalia, I do remember receiving some GDPR gibberish about the Steinkeller Brothers.
Fraudsters in Europe still occasionally utilize the trick, even though they’ve generally dried up. If what I recall was sent by Eliminalia, it would have been generic enough for me to merely reply to and delete because I only keep correspondence sent by lawyers.
I did find one notice from July 2021 stored on the Lumen Database. I think this is most likely the work of Eliminalia, sent as a fake DMCA notice from “Global News” against BehindMLM’s original reporting on the Steinkeller Brothers leaving OneCoin.
The Steinkeller Brothers: Overview of Eliminalia, the company that provides their fraud supported
Eliminalia has been involved in the reputation-washing industry for ten years and is situated in Barcelona. The business has expanded into a prominent participant in the worldwide hiring misinformation market from a wood-paneled working together facility on the famed Portal de l’Angel shopping district that it co-occupies with twenty other tenants.
Nearly 50,000 papers from the reputation management firm Eliminalia were distributed with numerous media partners and released to the French NGO Forbidden Stories. As part of the Story Killers project, more than 100 journalists collaborated to look into the disinformation-for-hire business.
How does the Eliminalia leak work?
The data includes specific information about Eliminalia’s clients in 50 different countries throughout the world, including their identities, the agreements they have signed, and other legal documents.
For the first time, reporters were allowed access to the operations of one of the most significant “black hat” (hacker) reputation management firms in the world.
Hacking techniques used by a Spanish reputation management organization assist criminals worldwide in erasing the past.
Two of them had narcotics trafficking convictions. One person was accused of laundering [ing] proceeds from prostitution. Another provided the Syrian government with US equipment. Three more people have been accused of helping to facilitate a cryptocurrency fraud that cost investors billions of dollars.
These are just a few of the more than 1,400 clients who have worked with Eliminalia, an online reputation management business that claims to “erase your past,” including dozens of people who have been convicted or are suspected of being criminals.
Diego “Didac” Giménez Sánchez: Leading Head of the Eliminalia
Diego “Didac” Giménez Sánchez, a thirty-year-old Spanish businessman who is presently believed to be residing in Georgia, is the man behind Eliminalia, according to the company’s official website. Sánchez claims to be in charge of a vast network of businesses, which includes a Ukrainian surrogacy agency that is being looked into for baby trafficking.
However, it appears that he established this network with Jose Maria Hill Prados, a man who was found guilty of molesting him infantilely. Spanish investigators believe Hill Prados may also oversee the reputation manager, despite the fact that his name is not found in Eliminalia’s records.
Reporters were able to map Eliminalia’s massive digital influence network thanks to the thousands of leaked documents that a French non-profit organization, Forbidden Stories, was able to access and share with OCCRP and a number of partners. The records add to earlier findings and provide a unique look at the range of deceptive strategies the firm employs to quell client feedback.
According to the records, Eliminalia, which in late December switched its name to iData Protection S.L., intimidated journalists with copyright and privacy regulations, tricked search engines to obfuscate information, and produced bogus news. Even with its own illegal clients, the corporation has launched new business endeavors in several nations.
Eliminalia, according to experts, is a component of a burgeoning disinformation industry that aids negative actors, such as criminals and kleptocrats, in concealing their shady pasts.
Tena Prelec, an Oxford University research fellow who specializes in transnational kleptocracy, remarked that the current system of money and reputation laundering and everyday kleptocracy rely on transnational professional intermediaries.
We have a whole series of professional service industries, such as public relations agents, lobbyists, and lawyers, who basically help in this repurposing of unsavory individuals, companies, and governments as internationally respected businesspeople and philanthropic cosmopolitans.
The legal counsel for Eliminalia declined to comment on inquiries for this project, claiming that many of them involved customer information that was confidential to the company. They charged bias against the media.
The vast majority of the questions’ content and orientation, they claimed, “demonstrate a partial and dishonorable approach.”
Sánchez, who describes himself as a self-made businessman, started his first reputation management firm in Spain when he was just 20 years old. He established a number of additional enterprises over the ensuing years before relocating his headquarters to Ukraine, where he employed writers to compose reviews and false legal notifications for journalists.
Among Sánchez’s various business endeavors was Subrogalia, a surrogacy agency that matched Spanish parents with Ukrainian women who potentially bear their offspring.
Despite the fact that he is the company’s public face, papers discovered by OCCRP reveal that Hill Prados, who was jailed in Spain for abusing Sanchez sexually as a kid, actually owned the company’s Ukrainian firm.
Hill Prados is allegedly the recipient of Eliminalia, according to two Spanish law enforcement authorities in charge of cyber threats who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
However, because they were vague in their explanation of their support, OCCRP was unable to independently confirm the assertion.
Eliminalia is a component of a network of at least 54 businesses that have been connected to Hill Prados and Sánchez during the last ten years in nine different countries. They declined to respond to this report in any way.
So, therefore, Eliminalia was also hired to represent famous OneCoin resellers, a fraudulent cryptocurrency operation that defrauded investors out of billions of dollars. Aron, Christian, and Stephan Steinkeller, three brothers (The Steinkeller Brothers), are suspected of earning millions of euros from the plan and are currently being prosecuted in Italy. In 2021, a business made a payment of 38,000 euros to Eliminalia. An inquiry for comments was not answered by the Steinkeller brothers.
Conclusion
Finally, I’d like to mention that the Steinkeller Brothers, famed for their involvement in the notorious One Coin Ponzi Scheme, have been the target of legal issues and charges of financial crimes and fraud.
They were among the highest-paid participants in the scheme, which duped investors of billions of dollars. Despite the accusations and charges, one of the brothers has re-entered the MLM industry with a new company named Planet Impact. The other brother has managed to avoid extradition to Italy.
Through leaked documents acquired by Forbidden Stories, the connection between the Steinkeller Brothers and Eliminalia, a reputation management company with a questionable reputation, has been revealed.
Eliminalia is accused of utilizing dishonest methods to remove information from the internet for its clients, including dishonest politicians, fraudsters, and criminals. These methods allegedly include impersonating EU representatives, violating GDPR rules, and filing fake DMCA claims.
The putative leader of Eliminalia, Diego “Didac” Giménez Sánchez, is a controversial individual with connections to a network of companies, some of which are engaged in drug trafficking.
Eliminalia’s operations have been illuminated by the leaked documents, which also disclose the company’s participation with clients who engage in unlawful activity and its function in the disinformation-for-hire market.
These financial crimes need to be stopped by the higher authorities as many investors lost their money while investing the OneCoin It is better to stay away from these websites. It
Steinkeller Brothers have been investigated by numerous investigations because they had suspicions that these individuals were up to something nefarious after being named the big buff.
It is hard to see that the 14 promoters of OneCoin were charged by the Italian Law Enforcement agency Guardia the Finaza found to be indulging in the Ponzi schemes, and illegally gathering in the electronic money transfer.
In the Shake of Money, how does Eliminalia do this as it supports the dishonest politicians and the scammer who were involved in the One Coin scam? While doing so it also defrauded the EU.
This is horrible that the Steinkeller Brothers gave a bribe to the Eliminalia to hide or erase the frauds that they were doing to the people. This is an unethical business practice that they were doing to hide their criminal past and submit false DMCA claims.
This is heart-breaking how these brothers do to anyone! Thousands of stories and thousands of victims have lost their money while dealing with these fraudsters. At last, everyone came to look for their money.