Plusspay Founder Fled After $84M Stablecoin Scheme for Sanctioned Gang

Published by James Harris on June 15, 2026June 15, 2026

Chilean prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for Jose Manuel Rios Guaido, the Venezuelan-born founder of fintech platform Plusspay, after investigators linked his company to over $84 million in suspicious financial activity tied to Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization already sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury. Guaido was not found at Plusspay’s Santiago offices or any registered address when detectives raided the premises on June 13, and authorities believe he may have fled to Venezuela or Colombia.

The alleged mechanism is straightforward and increasingly familiar: accept local currency, convert it to stablecoins (in this case primarily USDT and USDC), then route the funds to wallets and bank accounts abroad. Tether and Circle’s dollar-pegged tokens have become the preferred rails for this kind of cross-border value movement precisely because they settle instantly, require no correspondent banking relationship, and can be received by any wallet address without a compliance department asking questions. The pattern here echoes what regulators across Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe have documented repeatedly since 2022: stablecoins do not introduce new criminal behavior, but they compress the number of steps required to move money across jurisdictions, which matters operationally to criminal networks. Tren de Aragua, according to InSight Crime reporting cited in the source, has been deliberately upgrading from basic wire transfers to layered schemes mixing shell companies and crypto conversions.

Plusspay was registered with Chile’s Financial Market Commission, which turns out to mean almost nothing. The CMF clarified, after the investigation became public, that registration and authorization are two separate steps, and that Inversiones Plusservice had failed to update its records as required under General Rule No. 502.

That regulatory gap is the part of this story that extends beyond one arrested founder. Chile’s Fintech Law created a registration system that bad actors can apparently use as a legitimacy signal to clients and banking partners without ever completing the authorization process that would invite real scrutiny. If prosecutors can demonstrate that Plusspay used its CMF registration to access Chile’s banking system while laundering funds for a sanctioned criminal organization, the political pressure on the CMF to tighten that gap will be immediate. Other Latin American jurisdictions building similar two-step fintech registration frameworks should be paying attention, because the structural vulnerability is not unique to Chile.

A separate money laundering ring linked to Tren de Aragua was broken up in Chile just eight days before the Plusspay raid, with nearly 20 arrests and over 140 bank accounts frozen in what Prosecutor Héctor Barros described as one of the largest such cases the country had seen. Two operations of this scale within two weeks suggests Chilean authorities are working through a connected network, not responding to isolated incidents.