The cocktail of ostentation and cryptocurrencies that ended in death on the Costa del Sol

He lived a life of luxury on the Costa del Sol, renting costly houses and driving around in a beautiful dark blue Lamborghini Urus worth more than €270,000. He also bragged about his huge bitcoin portfolio. In April, a 37-year-old Dutch man was kidnapped in Mijas (Málaga, population 93,302) when he and his 29-year-old Colombian partner went to get the keys to a house they intended to move into. The middleman set up a meeting for them in an open field, and from then on, everything went awry. Four masked individuals in black showed up and tried to make them get into a car. The man tried to get away, but he was shot in the leg. Then they pulled them to the car, which transported them to a house. “The woman even thought she wouldn’t get out alive,” police sources stated.

The police have put together the major clues to a kidnapping that happened in a town with a complicated network of scattered housing projects. Like many cases probed on the Costa del Sol, this one stood out because of its international links. On November 11th, police in Málaga arrested five people and prosecuted four others in Denmark. One of them was the kidnapper, who is already serving time in his own country for another kidnapping. The other was the tenant of the property where the couple was held, who is also in prison in Denmark for drug trafficking. In the first nine months of this year, kidnappings across the country have gone up by 13% compared to the same time last year. The Ministry of the Interior put together information from several police agencies that showed 87 cases were reported during that time, 13 of which were in the province of Málaga.

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The people who were arrested in Málaga are being looked into for allegedly helping to kidnap the Lamborghini man and his partner by getting cars, making transportation easier and getting rid of evidence. They were taken to Court Number 2 in Fuengirola, where they were released on bond with some safety measures. They were charged with murder, illegal detention, robbery with violence, illegal possession of firearms, and being a member of a criminal organisation.

Sources close to the case said that the inquiry had problems from the start. At first, there was simply the woman’s report on file. She proceeded to the Provincial Police Station in Málaga to tell them what had transpired after being let go in a part of Fuengirola. It was hard to figure out which house they had been held in because her boyfriend didn’t have any known adversaries or debts that could be linked to the kidnapping. There weren’t many leads, and the area that needed to be searched was rather big. A search operation that lasted for days and covered a huge region of the Sierra de Mijas found nothing. The victim’s parents even came from the Netherlands to closely watch the investigation.

Finally, on April 23rd, exactly 20 days after the allegation was made, a man who was clearing undergrowth on his property near a creek found a body with its hands bound and blood on it. The Guardia Civil, who is in charge of Mijas, started the inquiry until they found out it was the missing Dutchman. People who know about the investigation said that there were no signs of him being beaten or tortured, although he did have a gunshot wound to the knee. The predominant hypothesis is that he bled to death and that the kidnappers left the body in the most mountainous spot they could discover. Officers had been extremely close to the area days previously, which was next to a stream and on a steep slope.

The next big clue came when they located his Lamborghini, which is what gave the operation its name: Lambo/Urus. Things started to make sense little by little. Police sources stress that “the investigation started to align in the summer.” That’s when they figured out who did it. Later, they found the two cars that were used in the kidnapping: the one that the couple was forced into, which had blood on it that forensic experts are looking at to see whether it matches the victim’s, and another car that was used in the crime. In the end, they found the house in the Sierra de Mijas highlands, close to the Santa Golf Club, where the kidnapping had happened. There, they found a lot of biological evidence of the attacks.

Wallet in the cloud

Another very difficult part of the inquiry has been showing that the kidnappers were able to get to the man’s digital assets. They even took money from his virtual wallet and put it into their own bank accounts. The first one was for about €42,500 and the second one was for €36,100.

People that wish to steal the cryptocurrency need to get the keys to this wallet, which depend on how the money is held. If you have a private wallet, these keys may be a seed phrase or a key. If you have money on an exchange platform, they could be a password. Investigators can follow these transfers and find out which accounts they go to and who is in charge of them.

Last November, after the agents had everything ready, they did six raids: five in Málaga and one in Madrid. They recovered a real and a fake handgun, an expandable baton, and a balaclava in the homes. They also recovered trousers with blood and biological material that matched the blood found in the house where the couple was detained. They also took documents, a lot of electrical gadgets, and mobile phones.

The inquiry has had effects around the world because the deceased was Dutch and her parents had also reported her missing there. The major suspects are Danish, although some Spanish nationals have also been arrested. Two of them are in prison in Denmark and will have to go to court in Spain.

The investigation included different parts of the National Police, such as Group I of the Organised Crime Unit of the Málaga Provincial Police Station, which deals with kidnappings, and agents from the General Police Headquarters for Judicial Investigations, such as Group I of Kidnappings, the Missing Persons Unit, and the Crypto Assets Unit. The Mijas Local Police also helped them.