“Ronaldo is my favorite player, I think he is the most complete player in the history of football. However, his behavior off the pitch has to be judged differently”, declared Rui Pinto – hackerfor the judicial authorities, whistleblower (whistleblower) to others, such as former MEP Ana Gomes – in an interview in February this year. With this outburst, Rui Pinto would end up denouncing his intentions when, according to what the judicial investigation has already established, he invaded the e-mail boxes of the football star and his lawyers, and would have been at the origin of the news about the case of the alleged violation in the USA and the millionaire tax evasion in Spain.
As a victim and as a witness, Cristiano Ronaldo was at the headquarters of the Judiciary Police (PJ) in early June to be heard as part of the investigation into Rui Pinto, detained since March on suspicion of crimes of attempted extortion, illegitimate access, breach of secrecy. , offense to the legal person – these related only to the Doyen Sports Investment Fund.
The PJ’s National Unit to Combat Cybercrime and Technological Crime (UNC3T), which has this investigation in hand, took advantage of the presence of the best player in the world in Portugal, on the occasion of the League of Nations tournament, and Ronaldo came down from Porto to Lisbon, being received with absolute discretion.
One of the documents that Rui Pinto accessed and later revealed through the Football Leaks platform was the agreement signed between Cristiano Ronaldo and Kathryn Mayorga, in which the American (who accuses the Portuguese player of rape) was obliged to keep silent about the alleged events in Las Vegas, in exchange for almost 325 thousand euros. “O hacker tried to sell the information, and a media outlet irresponsibly ended up publishing some of the stolen documents, significant parts of which were altered and/or completely fabricated”, lamented one of Ronaldo’s lawyers.
Other documents related to the activity of the current Juventus player were also released by the German magazine The mirror, which is part of the EIC (European Investigative Collaborations) journalism consortium, which investigates Football Leak allegations. This is the case of the famous Spanish tax evasion, which forced Ronaldo to pay 18.8 million euros, in addition to being subject to a suspended sentence of two years in prison, before leaving Real Madrid for the Italian club.
Court refuses special complexity
According to what UNC3T has already managed to ascertain from the analysis of the material (hard disks, external disks and pen drives) seized from Rui Pinto, in addition to Doyen, the hacker entered dozens of other emails, some of which at the highest level of the security and justice system. Magistrates from the Public Ministry, elements of the Internal Administration, PSP, law firms, FIFA, FC Porto and the South American Football Confederation are some examples, in addition to the already known Benfica and Sporting.
In addition to Cristiano Ronaldo, the DN learned from a judicial source, the PJ has been listening or will listen to several other “offended”, including those responsible for the Central Department of Investigation and Criminal Action (DCIAP), of the Department of Investigation and Action. (DIAP), foreign and national law firms, such as PLMJ (defended Benfica in the e-Toupeira case), the General Secretariat of the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the criminal investigation division of the PSP – all attacked by the hacker.
Patiently, computer experts have managed to break the codes and decrypt the files that Rui Pinto organized with all the information he copied from his victims’ computers. “Hundreds, if not thousands, of illegitimate access crimes are at stake”, underlines a source who is following the process.
The size of all the material already deciphered is such that the process is growing day by day, having even led the prosecutor of the MP, head of the investigation, Patrícia Barão, to request from the investigating court an extension of the period of investigation for another six months (until March 2020), by declaring the special complexity of the process.
However, the DN learned, this Friday the judge’s decision was to deny this claim by the MP, thus forcing investigators to accelerate the collection of evidence to support an accusation that may thus go much further than the facts related to Doyen.
The MP maintained that “the success of the present investigation depends on the extension of the respective investigation period, because only in this way is it possible to fully clarify the facts, with the determination of the full dimension of the defendant Rui Pinto’s performance, which, demonstrably, is not limited to Sporting and Doyen, nor to sporting entities”. The prosecutor also argued that it was possible to determine that “the accused was able to use software and offensive tools aimed at exploiting remote access to the victims’ system that it believed might contain elements that it considered of interest”, namely “with the possible intention of using them for sale to the media or carrying out other extortion activities”, as was the attempt with Doyen.
