veneziace.com is a scam: the staircase of payments that never ends

Preliminary note: we are a law firm and we deal exclusively with online fraud. This article arises from a real case handled by the firm and is published in anonymised form as regards the injured party and everyone else involved, for public interest purposes. The technical data come from checks on the public domain-name registries carried out on the date of publication. If you recognise yourself in what you read, you can submit your situation using the form at the bottom of this page.

Sixty thousand euros paid in. An "approved withdrawal" of more than thirty-four thousand. And then one payment demand after another, each with a different name and a close deadline, until the total to be paid exceeded the sum the injured party was supposed to receive.

When they came to us, the people behind veneziace.com were demanding more money by a specific date. And the "lawyer" who claimed to be handling the case was explaining that it had to be paid.

veneziace.com is a scam, the firm has already handled this case, and this article describes the mechanism that makes it so effective: a staircase of payments built so that it never ends.

Why veneziace.com is a scam: the checks

Let us start with the objective data, which anyone can verify.

The domain veneziace.com was registered on 9 July 2026, expiring on 9 July 2027: one year, the minimum term. It was presented to the injured party as The Venetian Macao casino, a real establishment that genuinely exists in Macao and has nothing whatever to do with this site: it too is an injured party. The same goes for the Venetian echo in the name, which evokes a historic, licensed Italian casino.

Then comes the figure that outweighs all the others. There is a twin domain, veneziace01.com, registered by the same operator on the same day and in the same second as veneziace.com. Not "the same day": the same second. Two names bought in a single operation, from the same account, with the same one-year term.

It is worth explaining why this matters, given that elsewhere we have explained why a shared IP address proves almost nothing. An IP address can be shared by thousands of unrelated sites. A registration timestamp identical to the second, with the same registrar and the same term, is not a statistical coincidence: it is a single purchase. It is exactly the kind of fact worth putting in a criminal complaint, because it links two separate cases to the same hand.

And separate cases there are: the firm has already handled a matter concerning the twin domain, which we described when writing about the fake 15% tax.

The decisive point remains. In Italy remote gambling may be offered only by licensed operators entered on the register of the Customs and Monopolies Agency. veneziace.com has no licence, no VAT number, no company name, no verifiable corporate reference. There is no company to name, because there never was one.

The staircase of payments that never ends

This is where veneziace.com shows its true nature, and it is the part worth reading carefully even if you have never gambled online, because the same scheme is found in fake trading platforms.

On the veneziace.com panel the injured party was told that the withdrawal request of more than 34,000 euros had been approved. From that moment on they were no longer asked to invest: they were asked to pay in order to receive.

The sequence, in the veneziace.com case, was this.

First a 15% "tax" on the winnings, about 5,100 euros, presented as a Macao fiscal obligation. After a partial payment, a demand for the balance.

Then a "verification deposit" of about 6,800 euros, to be returned together with the withdrawal. Then a "security deposit" of 12,240 euros. Then a 30% "insurance fee" on the by-then larger amount, almost 16,000 euros, also "to be returned within 24 hours".

Then an "anti-money-laundering certificate" to be obtained from the Macao authorities, at the modest cost of over 20,000 euros in deposit. Then a guarantee bond, because the withdrawals were "split into several operations".

The total demanded by veneziace.com had by then passed 97,000 euros: more than the injured party was supposed to receive.

That is the point of veneziace.com, and it is the only thing to remember from this whole article: the staircase never ends, because it is not built to end. Each payment does not bring the withdrawal closer: it generates the next pretext. As long as the person pays there will be another step; when they stop paying, the site disappears.

The cruellest step: "you used someone else's account"

In the veneziace.com sequence there is one passage that deserves to be isolated, because it is the most carefully designed of them all.

At a certain point a message arrives saying, in substance: part of your payments did not come from an account in your name, so the transaction is suspected of money laundering, the "anti-fraud department" has refused the documentation, and to prove the lawful origin of the funds you must make the 8,000-euro transfer again from your personal account.

Look at what this message does. It takes the most frightening accusation that can be made against someone who has moved money — money laundering — and turns it against the victim. It tells them the problem is theirs, the fault is theirs, and the solution is to pay again. It is the same mechanism we have seen in other files, where fake supervisory authorities demand money: we have written about it in relation to ecommbx.online and hmtreasurygovuk.com.

In criminal law the classification is precise. An unjust harm threatened in order to obtain a payment is no longer merely fraud: it is extortion under Article 629 of the Italian Criminal Code, completed if you pay, attempted if you do not.

Where the money ends up

One fact emerges clearly from the veneziace.com documentation, and it is useful to anyone in the same position.

The transfers were not requested to a foreign corporate account, as one would expect from a Macao casino. They were requested to Italian current accounts held by natural persons, at different Italian banks, with an obvious geographical concentration: several different beneficiaries in the same area. The payment reference was always the same: "payment for invoice no. 002", "payment for invoice no. 003". Invoices that do not exist.

Alongside the transfers, a long series of wallet addresses for cryptocurrency payments, changed with almost every demand.

Two practical observations. First: the names of the holders of those accounts are not published here, and they must not be contacted. They are often people who have themselves been recruited, or whose identities have been used without their knowledge, and a private initiative is not merely useless but risks compromising the investigation. That information belongs in the complaint, not in a chat.

Second: precisely because the accounts are Italian, the route is viable. An Italian bank answers the Italian judicial authority within reasonable time, and the fictitious payment reference is itself something to be raised.

The second circle: the fake lawyer

There is one last part of the veneziace.com story that must be told, because it is the one that does the most damage.

Before coming to us, the injured party had already been contacted by someone presenting themselves as the lawyer handling their case. That self-styled professional did not tell them to stop: they explained that the withdrawal request really had been approved, that the funds were "awaiting delivery", that the document received was "their proof", and that payment had to be made as instructed — indeed suggesting that they should buy time with the casino without arousing suspicion.

This is the second circle of the same veneziace.com fraud. After the fake operator comes the fake defender, and their task is not to recover the money: it is to persuade the victim that paying one more time is the way out.

How do you spot it? A lawyer does not collect money on the client's behalf, does not promise a result, does not endorse payments to natural persons on private accounts, does not work without a written retainer and a transparent fee, and appears on the public roll of their bar association, which anyone can consult. If the person writing to you fails one of these checks, they are not a lawyer.

Why no casino asks you for money in order to pay you

It is worth fixing the principle, because it holds everywhere, not only for veneziace.com.

Unlike veneziace.com, a licensed gambling operator withholds whatever is due and credits the net amount: it does not ask the player to pay in order to receive. Taxes are not paid to the operator, still less by bank transfer to a private individual. No supervisory authority, in Macao or anywhere else, collects money into a private account or a wallet.

So the practical rule is a single one and admits of no exception: the moment you are asked to send money in order to receive money, the communication is false. It does not matter how convincing the attached document is, how urgent the deadline, how technical the explanation.

The legal framework

The veneziace.com facts date from 2026, and are therefore subsequent to Law 90/2024: Article 640(2-ter) of the Italian Criminal Code applies, which aggravates fraud committed remotely by means of computer tools capable of obstructing identification of the perpetrator.

The aggravating circumstances of diminished capacity to defend oneself (Article 61(5)) and of particularly serious financial loss (Article 61(7)) also apply; the payments repeated over time amount to a continuing offence (Article 81(2)).

The phase of demands accompanied by threats is separately relevant as extortion (Article 629), completed or attempted. Using the name of a real casino and of purported authorities amounts to impersonation (Article 494); anyone passing themselves off as a lawyer is liable for the unlawful exercise of a profession (Article 348). Collecting remote gambling without a licence is penalised by Article 4 of Law 401/1989. The subsequent movement of the sums is relevant as money laundering (Article 648-bis) and, for whoever reinvests them, as self-laundering (Article 648-ter.1).

Finally, the computer-related aspect must be assessed: here too remote-control software was used on the victim's computer, a point on which we refer to what we have written about webtrader.rdpsystem.pro.

The aggravating circumstances of the second paragraph of Article 640 and the extortion make the matter prosecutable ex officio.

What to do now

Anyone caught up in the veneziace.com affair, or in an identical one, must do three things in this order.

Stop paying, immediately. Whatever the sum, whatever the deadline, whatever the consequence announced. There is no last step.

Secure the computer and the mailbox, if remote-assistance software was installed: uninstall it, change the passwords from another device, enable two-step verification, check that no automatic forwarding to unknown addresses has been set up in the mailbox.

Gather and file. You need: the complete bank advices for all transfers, with destination IBAN, bank and reference; the wallet addresses used and the transaction hashes for the cryptocurrency payments; the native export of the conversations, done with the application's own function and not with photographs of the screen; screenshots of the panel and of the documents received; and the complete banking documentation in official form, invoking Article 119(4) of the Italian Consolidated Banking Act, which gives the right to a copy of the documentation of transactions over the last ten years.

The complaint must contain the application for the preventive seizure of the sums (Article 321 of the Code of Criminal Procedure), the request for information on registration under Article 335 and the request for notice in the event of a request to shelve the case under Article 408(2).

Similar cases already handled by the firm

Anyone who has come across veneziace.com will also find useful our analysis of sepa.finance, where an identity document sent by the self-styled operator turns out to be forged, that of eu-ecommbx.com on fake fund recovery, and that of a.holdhands.vip, written for people who are still inside the fraud as they read.

If you are paying money to veneziace.com: stop

The picture is this. veneziace.com is a scam: a domain registered on 9 July 2026 for a single year, bought in the same second as a twin domain, using the name of a real casino, with no Italian licence, demanding transfers to natural persons with references to invoices that do not exist.

The approved withdrawal on veneziace.com does not exist. The deposits "to be returned" never come back. The money-laundering accusation is an instrument of pressure, not an act of any authority.

The firm has already handled this case. You can submit your situation for a preliminary assessment.

If you have suffered the same scam, we can help you. Fill in the form at the bottom of this page.