UEFA football crypto fund: the millionaire scam

A web search for UEFA Football Crypto Fund turns up a cryptocurrency-based algorithmic sports trading platform described as a football speculative investment fund jointly initiated by the UAE consortium and City Football: two nonexistent entities.

UEFA Football Crypto was set up as an alternative way to invest in soccer through betting, i.e., wagering sums of money in order to make a profit by leveraging users who are passionate about fantasy soccer and sports betting.

The UEFA Football application

Summary

• Features of UEFA Football Crypto
• How did the scam take place?
• How does a Ponzi scheme work?
• Millions of euros converted into crypto

Features of UEFA Football Crypto

UEFA Football Crypto was an app that was easily installed on an iOS or Android mobile device, and for each new user there was a welcome bonus on the first deposit, ranging from $2 to $120, depending on the initial amount deposited by the user: the minimum deposit was a not excessively high amount of only €20.

The register of deposits

As mentioned above, there is sports betting trading in UEFA Football Crypto Fund, where users invest on the odds of certain sporting events: the more the odds decrease, the more the investor’s position gains value.

Therefore, the user had only two daily matches to bet on and the possibility to then define the match based on certain parameters such as risk percentage, odds trend, and betting prediction.

How did the scam take place?

The scammed users were promised daily interest as a percentage of 2.50 of the capital invested in bets and a refund of losses: in other words, even if the user did not hit the bet, he would not lose anything because the platform would refund him the odds he had invested.

The scam clearly exploited the Ponzi pyramid scheme.

How does a Ponzi scheme work?

The Ponzi scheme is an economic sales model based on deception: the person offering the investment leads people to believe that they can have large short-term gains without any risk, provided that the investor in turn recruits other investors.

A classic pyramid scheme of deception is thus created.

Millions of euros converted into crypto

This alleged entity, UEFA Football Crypto Fund, scammed millions of euros from more than 50,000 Italian victims, which were then converted into crypto and flowed into numerous wallets, exchanges, including Binance, FTX, and OKX: the scammers then converted the cryptocurrencies into dollars, as attested by Decripto.org, one of the first news outlets on the crypto and blockchain world.

The Italian CONSOB (The National Commission for Companies and the Stock Exchange) for 90 days suspended the offering activity to the public residing in Italy and blacked out the official website.

After the website was blacked out, it was written on UEFA Football’s Telegram channel that the Italian government has demanded payment of taxes and users must pay 26% on profits, capital gains, otherwise the account will be closed: obviously another scam within the scam that users should pay attention to.

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