'Prohibited migrant' Alberto Chang Rajii used virtual card to make €10,664 in unauthorised purchases

Notorious Chilean ‘investor’ Alberto Chang Rajii used a virtual credit card to make €10,664 worth of unauthorised transactions from a former acquaintance’s account and is currently in Malta illegally, a court was told today.

This emerged from the first sitting in the compilation of evidence against Chang Rajii, earlier today. The defendant, who was dubbed the ‘Chilean Bernie Madoff’ over his connection with a ponzi scheme in his home country in the early 2000s, was charged earlier this month in Malta with offences related to fraud and aggravated theft.

Chang is wanted in Chile to face criminal proceedings for tax evasion and multi-million dollar fraud through a Ponzi scheme, but an extradition attempt had been blocked by the Court of Criminal Appeal in 2018.

More charges - relating to additional alleged victims - were also added today.

The victim of the credit card fraud, Kevin Decesare, took the witness stand before magistrate Gabriella Vella on Tuesday. Decesare, who described himself as a consultant with a leisure company, was asked about what had led him to file the police report that led to Chang Rajii’s arrest. “I had been in a meeting and ten minutes after the meeting ended, I received an alert on my phone about a banking transaction having been done at a place called Inhawi. It was for €540.”

“Was it done by you?” asked prosecutor Claire Sammut, who is representing the Office of the Attorney General in the proceedings.

“No. Absolutely not,” Decesare replied. “I managed to find out that Inhawi was a hostel and so I called its number but the receptionist could not give me any information, so I asked for the manager.

The manager told Decesare that she could not reveal who made the transaction because of data protection regulations. “I said ‘look, I’m going to come there and try and sort it out.’ When I told her this, she said, ‘I cannot give you any information, so you will have to bring the police with you.”

Decesare asked for the assistance of police officers from the St. Julians police station, who accompanied him to the hostel and spoke with the manager, while Decesare waited outside.

“At one point, I saw Alberto Chang,” said the witness, who explained that he knew Chang Rajii from the Chilean’s unsuccessful bid to acquire Maltese citizenship.

“Around 2015 he had come to Malta to acquire a passport and had rented a flat from me through Henley and Partners… I had dealt with Henley. It was a six-year contract and that was it,” Decesare said, adding that he hadn’t spoken to the defendant since 2022.

Decesare said he had initially been undecided as to whether to report Chang Rajii to the police over the missing money. “But then I went back through my accounts and discovered some €10,664 missing.” The hefty total was made up of small transactions made every day, mostly from online stores and the like, Decesare explained. “Because they were such small amounts, they didn’t trigger an alert.” 

But over the space of a few months the amounts transacted had suddenly increased to around €400, said the witness, surmising that this was because Chang Rajii had realised that the unauthorised transactions weren’t being noticed.

The witness was shown bank statements for his card, which he confirmed as genuine. Only he would use the card in question, he said, and denied that he made the transactions.

“I had time to think about how this happened. Chang would need to buy small things, like Netflix, and would ask me for my credit card which I would hand over and then take back.

The victim had been renting a property to Chang at the time, he explained. “He was very chummy. It came as a shock.”

“He had a lot on his mind at the time. There was an extradition process going on… I got on with him, he’s very intelligent, he knows a lot about a lot of things so when this happened, I was dumbfounded.”

Cross-examined by Chang Rajii’s lawyer, Ilona Schembri, the witness said that a similar situation had happened to him once before, when someone in Japan had misused a credit card of his. Dealing with the bank to rectify the situation had taken Decesare an hour and a half that time, he said and he had therefore been reluctant to go through that process again.

As a result, Decesare hadn’t called the bank to cancel the card after discovering the unauthorised €560 transaction, but went to the police instead. “I went to the police station. Five minutes to get there, then five minutes to Inhawi. In that ten minutes, I realised who was using the card, I gave it to the police, and the card was frozen.”

“I would always carry the card with me. I didn’t think it could happen.”

Pressed by Schembri as to why he hadn’t noticed previous transactions which he had highlighted to the police as suspicious, Decesare said that his secretary would handle his bank statements. 

“If I had looked at the statements, it wouldn’t have taken me twelve months to find out.”

Decesare told the court that the amount Chang Rajii had allegedly defrauded from him was €10,600.  When the lawyer suggested that Decesare would pay for Chang Rajii’s expenses, he replied that he hadn’t done so for several years. “In the first five years, when he would ask me if I could get him this and that, I would oblige.” 

The prosecution asked Decesare whether he had authorised anyone to carry out card transactions on his behalf. “Absolutely no,” replied the alleged victim.

A representative of the Identita’ agency told the court that the only application in Chang Rajii’s name that appeared on the agency’s system had been submitted in August 2015 and was valid until Jan 2017.  “It was a temporary permit, he could not work in Malta,” explained the witness. “He was granted a temporary permit which expired in 2017.”  Records showed that the permit had been revoked with a note which referred to an “email from Mr. Spagnol,” said the witness, but explained that the email itself could not be traced.

Among the other witnesses who testified today was Inspector Karl Roberts, from the police force’s immigration section.

Inspector Roberts was asked about Chang Rajii’s current immigration status. 

The defendant had filed an application in 2015, which was later revoked and had not been renewed, replied the witness. “He is considered a prohibited migrant and is subject to a return order by the principal immigration officer.”

When the last witness stepped off the stand on Tuesday, the prosecution informed the court that it had no further evidence to present. The court issued a ruling, stating that it deemed there to be sufficient reasons for Chang Rajii to be placed under a bill of indictment before the competent court. 

Chang remains in custody, with no request for bail having been filed since his arraignment.