My experience with @gamblito22 /Luigi Rubuano. I never thought I would have to write something like this about someone I genuinely considered a friend. But I believe people deserve to know about my experience and make up their own minds. I’m sharing this not for sympathy, but to warn others. 1/ How it started It all started on X. I’m someone who’s interested in the gambling community, so my For You feed is full of gambling-related content. I had already been following @gamblito22 for a while, never imagining that our lives would eventually cross and that we’d become what he called “friends.” One day, I saw a tweet where he was asking people for money. I was genuinely concerned, so I reached out and asked if he still needed help. I told him I could lend him some money and that it wasn’t a problem. He said yes. I offered to send him €1,000 so he could get by. He promised to repay me on Monday and even said he’d give me DOUBLE because I was such a good person for helping him. His explanation? He supposedly had a Ledger at home holding €2.5 MILLION in USDC. Think about it. Why would someone with €2.5 million need to beg for €1,000? Yeah, I don’t know how I didn’t see the red flags either. 😂 This all happened on a Saturday. 2/ The second request The following day, he contacted me again, asking for more money. He kept telling me that he would reward me even more for helping him and that I could always count on him. The fact that he’d supposedly spent €1,000 in less than eight hours already made me suspicious. I thought he might have gambled it away. I’m 20 years old. I have limited savings, and I wasn’t prepared to risk everything I had on someone else’s gambling. This time, he was asking for €5,000. Eventually, he manipulated me into sending another €1,000. He kept insisting that he was a millionaire, that the Ledger was real, and that the only reason he couldn’t access his money was because he wasn’t at home. I couldn’t bring myself to risk any more than that. 3/ Things started getting dangerous The next day, he asked me for money AGAIN. I told him I didn’t have any more to send and that all I had left was cash. That’s when Luigi suggested I meet up with people who gave me a really bad feeling so I could exchange my cash for crypto and send it to him. He didn’t seem to care about the risk I was taking or the situation he was putting me in. He just wanted his crypto so he could keep gambling. Thankfully, those people required a minimum exchange of €5,000, and I only had €3,000 in cash. We couldn’t reach an agreement. Luigi was furious. Nevertheless, he continued promising that on Monday he’d return the €2,000 I’d lent him, plus the extra money he’d promised. 4/ The story about the €2.5 million On Monday, he told me he was finally going to explain everything. According to him, he had an investment worth €2.5 million with a friend. That friend supposedly refused to send him the money, so Luigi went to Switzerland with “gangsters” to recover it. Apparently, this mission straight out of a movie was successful, and his former friend eventually transferred the €2.5 million to the Ledger he supposedly had at home. There was just one problem: he allegedly owed the gangsters €10,000 EACH for helping him recover the money. He claimed he was arriving home with them on Monday, but he didn’t want them to know where he lived because he was afraid they’d steal his Ledger. So, according to his story, he needed €10,000 from me immediately to pay them off before they discovered his address. Once he got inside, he’d turn on his Ledger and send me everything he owed me, plus DOUBLE for helping him. I asked him the obvious question: why couldn’t the gangsters wait on a nearby street while he went home and sent them the money? His answer was that they would inevitably steal the Ledger if they got anywhere near his house. I never received the money on Monday. Not a single euro of the €2,000