Are you from Barcelona?................
Posted on 11/15/2024 1:10:00 PM PST by nickcarraway
Here we go...Bayern Munich will be back on the pitch tomorrow!
When former Bayern Munich star Robert Lewandowski transferred to FC Barcelona, he could not imagine that he would be embroiled in an international scandal.
If it is true, a fake Pini Zahavi (as first reported by Cadena SER), succeeded in initially duping the Catalans — and almost collected a hefty fee in a scheme that was fitting of a Nigerian Prince.
Let’s dive in:
A joint investigation by the German magazine ‘Der Spiegel’, the anti-crime network ‘OCCRP’, the Spanish radio station ‘Cadena SER’ and the Dutch platform ‘Follow The Money’ uncovered an attempted fraud during the process of Robert Lewandowski’s transfer from FC Bayern to FC Barcelona in 2022.
That’s the intro...but how we got to that point is a real whopper:
At the end July 2022, the Catalans received an email from the address ‘pini.zahavi.48@gmail.com’ under the subject “Commission Lewandowski” demanding that they transfer one million euros to a certain Michael D. According to the email, Michael D. was a lawyer. FC Barcelona confirmed receipt of the letter to Der Spiegel. Pini Zahavi is Lewandowski’s agent and played a key role in the transfer. However, he himself said he had nothing to do with the ominous email and doesn’t know anyone by the name Michael D. It appears that it was a fraudster who misused someone else’s identity
Was “ILoveItWhenTheyCallMeBigPini6969@excite.com” not available? It is hard to believe things went that far, but it does keep going:
It has not been conclusively determined whether FC Barcelona actually transferred the million requested. However, there are indications that they did. For example, Der Spiegel learned from a source that a transfer had actually been sent from Barcelona to a Cypriot account. However, it was not accepted by the Bank of Cyprus due to the lack of information about the account’s owner. When asked whether the money had actually been sent, Barcelona did not give a specific answer to Der Spiegel. The club only stressed that the sender of the email had not received any money
What a story...
Are you from Barcelona?................
I used to get those Nigerian messages, regularly, but I haven’t gotten any recently. Maybe they figured I didn’t want 20 million dollars. 😀
What’s funny is that if Manuel was from Barcelona, most likely he’d speak Catalan and not Spanish.
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