Footballers accused as Shirtum crypto losses may exceed €24M

According to a new criminal complaint filed in Barcelona, a Spanish court is investigating six former Sevilla FC football players for their alleged role in a crypto scheme. The scheme allegedly sold fake NFTs and a manipulated token to investors, costing them over €24 million or $28 million.

Papu Gómez, Lucas Ocampos, Ivan Rakitić, Nico Pareja, Alberto Moreno, and Javier Saviola are the players named in the complaint. According to El Correo de Andalucía, two more football players, Diego Perotti and Marcelo Guedes, were also involved in promoting the project.

Thirteen investors from Spain filed a complaint with Barcelona’s Court of Instruction No. 5, saying they lost all of their money.

Shirtum never delivered filmic NFTs

Shirtum Europa, S.L.U., and other companies in Andorra ran the project, which advertised itself as a place to buy and sell digital football collectibles. It sold “filmic NFTs” with pictures and voice recordings of the accused players for about €450 each.

The people who filed the complaint say that these NFTs were never actually created on any blockchain. The complaint said that the assets could not be sold or transferred, so they were an absolute simulation of the product sold.

“These supposed NFTs technically never existed, were not transferable or resellable, and amounted to a complete simulation of the object sold to the detriment of the buyers,” based on one of the complaints.

Investigators could not find any proof that the tokens were on-chain.

Before the NFT sales, Shirtum’s promoters received ~€3 million in BNB tokens from investors to make a mobile app on iOS and Android. The complaint says that the app was never made, and the money was never returned or accounted for.

The company’s annual accounts also didn’t show the money it made from NFT sales, which was about €1 million.

The $SHI token and the pump-and-dump allegation

There is another layer to the alleged fraud that involves Shirtum’s own crypto, $SHI.

The expanded complaint says that out of the one billion tokens created, the four business promoters and the accused footballers got 78% or 780 million tokens for free. They then sold those tokens to retail investors on PancakeSwap for prices that were too high.

The people who are complaining say that the accused used false advertising and worked with the football players to create FOMO (fear of missing out) to get people to buy.

The complaint says that in July 2025, while a criminal investigation was already going on, the accused permanently removed $SHI’s liquidity from PancakeSwap.

The price of the token fell. It doesn’t trade on any exchange anymore. According to CoinGecko, $SHI is trading at $0.00003329 and is basically worthless.

Investors say that the $SHI token followed a pump and dump pattern. They think that the losses from the token manipulation alone will be at least €20 million, and the final number could be much higher.

Barcelona’s Court of Instruction No. 5 is still looking into the case. The Spanish police had already started their own investigation into Shirtum.

The new complaint adds the claims of token manipulation to the original NFT fraud claims. This means that more charges could be brought.