Barcelona were the victims of an attempted fraud concerned with Robert Lewandowski’s signing | OneFootball

FC Barcelona have had a very good start to the 2024-25 season, winning 8 of their 9 La Liga games, and several players deserve the credit for helping the team with this improvement in form.

One of the most prominent of these players is Robert Lewandowski, who is once again proving himself to be one of the best strikers in Europe even at the age of 36 years. With his performances this season, the Pole is dispelling any doubts that Barcelona fans had about him last season or when he was signed at 32 years of age.

Barcelona paid Bayern Munich €45 million for his signing. However, according to a report from Diario AS, the Polish superstar could have ended up costing the Catalans an extra €1 million.

The report claims that Barcelona were subject to an attempted fraud after the arrival of the Polish forward, as a fraudster posing as the player’s agent, Pini Zahavi, emailed the club’s directors and executives to pay a part of the commission for the signing of Lewandowski.

The fraudster asked the Catalans to transfer this money into the Bank of Cyprus, into an account that did not belong to Zahavi but to an alleged lawyer of the agent, Michael Gerardus Hermanus Demon.

Barcelona actually ended up transferring the €1 million demanded by the fraudster, but the concerned bank blocked the transfer as the account had no recent transactions, and there were no valid documents provided to justify the payment.

The person posing as Pini Zahavi then continued to press the bank into processing the payment and also threatened Barcelona to report the issue to UEFA if the money wasn’t transferred. The bank did not budge to the pressure, and the account was closed in 2022.

Meanwhile, the Catalans did acknowledge that they were victim of fraud, but the €1 million was recovered by the club.

Similarly, Zahavi has also confirmed that he had not sent any such email to Barcelona, while the person whose name was the title of the account claimed that he had not opened that account himself, but someone impersonated him to open that account.