We have already handled an odbaco.com scam case: fourteen thousand euros paid into a fake natural gas investment, partial refunds used as bait and a demand for ten thousand more to unlock the account. If you were caught by the same scam we can help you: use the form at the bottom of this page.
Note: we are a law firm dealing exclusively with online fraud. If you were caught in the same trap and want help, you can write to us using the form at the bottom of this article.
Why we say odbaco.com is a scam
We have already handled the case of a client who paid around fourteen thousand euros into odbaco.com, a platform presented as a natural gas investment operator. That money is now "frozen" in the platform account and, to release it, she is being asked to pay a further ten thousand euros.
On odbaco.com, as on every platform of this kind, there is no payment that releases capital which was never invested. We say it straight away, because in the case we examined the demand is still being made and whoever is reading this may be at exactly the same point.
How it starts: a natural gas advertisement
The first contact comes from an online advertisement about natural gas investments. After the form is filled in, a telephone call follows: a self-styled adviser of odbaco.com, who in our case introduced himself as Marco Romano, promises safe investments and high returns. The name is in all likelihood an invention, but it is worth reporting: these identities get reused on several victims and recognising them is often the first warning sign.
The natural gas theme is not accidental. It is a commodity everyone has heard about, whose prices have swung enormously in recent years: it is therefore plausible that "someone who knows how to move" makes a lot of money. That is precisely the psychological lever on which odbaco.com built its pitch.
The partial refund: the technique that convinces
This is the part we suggest reading carefully, because it is the mechanism that sets the odbaco.com case apart from many others.
The first payment into odbaco.com was 250 euros. Shortly afterwards she received 100 euros back. A real refund, which genuinely reached her account. From that moment the platform is no longer "a website found on the internet": it is an operator that gives money back, and therefore a reliable one.
The second step is larger and follows the same logic. Having paid 7,000 euros, she received 6,000 back. A substantial sum, actually credited, removing any remaining doubt. Immediately afterwards, however, the adviser asks her to pay it in again because "the position is open" and the return would be lost. Those 6,000 euros therefore go back onto the platform, and this time they never come out.
People who have been through this find it hard to tell the story, because with hindsight it looks obvious. It is not. The partial refund is an investment the organisation makes in you: it hands back a few hundred or a few thousand euros in order to obtain far more, and in the meantime it produces a two-way flow on your bank statement which makes the operation look less suspicious even to the bank's anti-fraud systems.
Legally, those incoming transfers are not evidence of good faith: they are part of the artifices and misrepresentations, and they must be described in the criminal complaint exactly like the outgoing payments, with dates and amounts. They also serve to calculate the actual loss, which is the difference between what went out and what genuinely came back.
The "frozen" account and the ten thousand euros to unlock it
In total she paid around fourteen thousand euros of her own money, against promised profits of up to fifty thousand. At a certain point the odbaco.com dashboard stopped allowing withdrawals and the adviser asked for a further ten thousand euros to "stabilise the account" and release the profit.
This is the closing stage of every scheme of this kind and it always has the same purpose: to extract the last available liquidity before disappearing. The labels change, the substance does not: unlocking fee, conversion commission, security deposit, safety margin. None of these items exists at an authorised intermediary, where withdrawing costs nothing.
What we checked on odbaco.com
The checks we run on any platform start from the simplest question: who operates it. On odbaco.com we found no company name, no VAT number, no registered office and no company registration number, and there is no reference whatsoever to an authorisation or a supervisory body. There is no entry in the registers kept by CONSOB, the Italian market authority, nor among the EU intermediaries entitled to operate in Italy.
The public domain registers add a few elements. odbaco.com was registered on 5 June 2023 with a French registrar, with expiry set at 5 June 2027: a domain kept alive for years, not bought for a single season. Its technical records were last modified on 22 June 2026, a few months before the facts we examined. The odbaco.com website sits behind a network service that hides the real address of its servers, while the mail of odbaco.com is run through a professional European business mailbox service.
That last point deserves a line of explanation, because it is why so many people trust these sites. Having business mailboxes means being able to write from addresses ending with the domain name which get past spam filters: the messages arrive in the inbox, they carry a letterhead, they look official. They are not. A professional mailbox costs a few euros a month and requires no verification that the company exists: it is not, and never has been, a guarantee.
Natural gas is a financial instrument
Offering the public investments in a commodity such as natural gas means, in almost every case, offering derivative contracts, which Italian financial law expressly classifies as financial instruments. Hence a consequence many victims are unaware of: collecting money and operating in this way requires authorisation.
Doing so without one is the offence of unlawful provision of investment services under article 166 of legislative decree 58/1998, punished by one to eight years' imprisonment and a fine. It is a charge that sits alongside fraud and that has a practical effect worth noting: it shifts attention from the single telephone conversation to the organisation that built and fed the collection.
Transfers abroad
In the odbaco.com case we handled the payments went abroad, the last one on 4 November 2026. That does not make the operation impossible to reconstruct, but it calls for tight deadlines and precise tools.
Banking records can be obtained for ten years under article 119, fourth paragraph, of the Italian Consolidated Banking Law, and intermediaries must keep account holders' identification data for the same period under legislative decree 231/2007. Where the money has crossed the border, the instrument is the European Investigation Order under legislative decree 108/2017, together with an application for preventive seizure under article 321 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. It should also be remembered that since 9 October 2025, under Regulation (EU) 2024/886, European banks must check that the beneficiary's name matches the IBAN given: if a mismatch warning appeared when the transfer was made, that warning is an element to record in the complaint.
The criminal framework
The conduct of whoever ran odbaco.com amounts to fraud under article 640 of the Italian Criminal Code, aggravated under the second paragraph no. 2-bis for exploiting the circumstance of distance referred to in article 61 no. 5. Since the facts date from 2026, the aggravating circumstance introduced in paragraph 2-ter by law 90/2024 also applies, covering frauds committed with IT or telematic tools apt to hinder identification of the perpetrator.
Also to be assessed are the aggravating circumstance of particularly serious financial harm under article 61 no. 7, the unlawful financial activity under article 166 of the Consolidated Law on Finance and, as regards anyone who made accounts or wallets available to move the money, money laundering under article 648-bis or self-laundering under article 648-ter.1. Aggravated fraud becomes time-barred after six years, a term that can reach seven years and six months where interrupting acts occur; the civil claim for damages follows the longer term under article 2947, third paragraph, of the Italian Civil Code.
The documents handed over
Personal documents had been sent to odbaco.com. Whoever organised the collection therefore holds a complete file, which in practice is reused to open accounts or apply for credit in the victim's name, with possible relevance of article 494 of the Criminal Code on impersonation and article 640-ter on computer fraud, or is resold to other groups, who reappear months later posing as fund recovery firms. The precise list of documents handed over belongs in the criminal complaint.
If you are still in contact with the "adviser"
In the case we examined the relationship with the self-styled adviser had not been broken off and the pressure to find more money was continuing. This is the most delicate situation, because the pressure is daily and plays on the fear of losing what has already been paid.
Do not pay any more money to odbaco.com, for any reason and under any name. Do not grant access to your computer or your phone through remote assistance software. Do not break off the conversation abruptly before saving everything: numbers, names, emails, dashboard screenshots, complete chat histories, beneficiary details. That material is the basis of the complaint and, in our experience, it is also what makes it possible to act quickly on the destination accounts.
What to do now
Keep every document, including receipts for outgoing transfers and for incoming credits. Ask your bank for complete copies of the payment records showing the beneficiaries' IBANs. File a criminal complaint as soon as possible: timing matters, because the money is moved fast. Do not turn to anyone who contacts you promising immediate recovery in exchange for an advance payment, because that is the second scam and it almost always hits the same people.
We can help you
Our firm deals exclusively with online fraud and has already handled cases entirely comparable to odbaco.com: fake commodity and crypto brokers, partial refunds used as bait, frozen accounts and unlocking payments.
If you have paid money to odbaco.com or to a platform working the same way, contact us using the form at the bottom of this page: we will review the documents and tell you honestly what concrete prospects exist in your case.
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