UPDATED AT 11:10 P.M. EDT U.S.A. JULY 28, 2014: Globo.com (Brazil) is reporting that police raided the headquarters of Ympactus this morning in a law-enforcement action dubbed “Operation Orion.” The story suggests raids also were carried out elsewhere and that Brazilian tax authorities are involved in the actions.
Ympactus is the Brazilian affiliate of TelexFree and is most closely associated with TelexFree figure Carlos Costa. Alleged TelexFree co-owners James Merrill and Carlos Wanzeler were indicted in the United States yesterday.
TelexFree may be the largest cross-border pyramid scheme in history, with U.S. regulators describing it as a billion-dollar fraud.
The Globo report is in Portuguese; the translation to English via Google is here.
Costa is not named in the U.S. indictment, which appears to refer to him as “a third man” who formed TelexFree in the United States with Merrill and Wanzeler in 2012. Wanzeler, believed to be in Brazil, is considered a fugitive by the United States, which has issued a warrant for his arrest.
Whether Brazilian and U.S. authorities were coordinating events was not immediately clear.
A snippet from the Google translation of the Globo story (italics added):
Altogether, participated in the action 50 federal police officers and 18 auditors from the IRS Brazil. The operation name alludes to the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt Plain considering that the Egyptian pyramids are perfectly aligned with the constellation Orion.
UPDATE 11:10 P.M. EDT U.S.A. JULY 28, 2014: Please see this from Mikaella Campos, an economics reporter at A Gazeta Newspaper in Brazil. We are grateful to Mikaella for posting it here.