LTW Invest victims lost money in a scam

She lost all her widowed mother’s money

Isabel Gravina, from São Paulo, says she was scammed. She invested R$160,000 for her mother in 2021.

We are no longer able to refund the money, which is all you have. My late father left it to her. life savings. Our family has been destroyed, and there are fights between the children.
Isabel Gravina

The company was known. She even curated the Flow Podcast, one of the most popular shows in the country.

View luxury living owners. Luis Henrique Brito Mendes and Carolina Lenz appeared on social networks on yachts and speedboats, holding glasses of sparkling wine and drinks developed.

LTW had no record. Despite defining itself as an investment broker in the stock market, the company with offices in Indaiatuba (SP) and São Paulo did not have the registration required by the Securities Commission (CVM) for investment firms to operate in the stock market. Stocks and investments.

LTW will pretend to be a brokerage and take money from investors. The promise was to invest in stocks that rarely go down and can go up a lot in a short period of time. All operations were carried out by the company.

The owners convinced the clients by showing the history of the assets. In 2021, the company closed its doors.

afterThe company promised to transfer the amounts invested by clients to other brokerage firms. But, according to the victims, this never happened.

The company displays on its website a message: “LTW Invest has begun the process of market settlement for its advanced, corporate and multi-market portfolios, but we are relying on market movements to do this as quickly as possible. Our consultant will contact each client to understand their problem and help you solve it.”

Lawyers are looking for corporate owners. Law firm Inhetta de Oliveira, Leite e Rios Barbosa, of Indaiatuba (SP), represents 147 victims of LTW and estimates the scam could be up to R$10 million. The lawyers registered the case in the 30th police district of São Paulo.

The investigation did not progress as the company’s owners could not be located. Therefore, the company hired private investigators to locate Luis Henrique Brito Mendez and Carolina Lenz, but there was no success.

The report was also unable to contact them.

Investment scams are on the rise

Customer complaints increased by 34.19%. These are the people who complain that they have invested and that they cannot get back their investment, usually in stocks. The comparison is from the second half of 2022 with the same period of 2021, according to Procon-SP.

The consumer protection authority changed its data collection platform in July 2021. Therefore, the total data for 2022 cannot be compared with that for the whole of 2021. In January this year, 33 complaints of this kind had already been registered.

How do you protect yourself from scams?

The company must be registered to legally operate with equity investments. The first thing to do before investing is to look for company registration or an independent agent, says Andre Demarco, director of self-regulation at BSM Supervisão de Mercados. And It is possible to check the enrollment on the CVM website.

There is no estimate of how many illegal businesses there are. CVM, the Central Bank, the Brazilian Association of Financial Entities and Capital Markets (Anbima) and the National Association of Brokers and Distributors of Bonds, Securities, Exchanges and Commodities (Ancord) told the reporter UOL who do not have this data.