Complaint Review: Marcelo Ballona

Marcelo Ballona (fake name, as noted by another complainer) is scamming people and companies worldwide since he was fired from Submarino.com, a leading e-commerce company in Brazil he claims to have founded (bullsh*t).

I don't have the slightest idea of why Submarino or its parent company B2W never sued him for using their name to support his scams, I guess they think such a small rat is not worth of the effort.

If you check Ballona's profile on Linkedin - try not to laugh at the crappy English - you will see a documented history of his scams. Ballona left Brazil for the US, allegedly for a sabbatical (strange for someone that didn't really work in the past 10 years), but the truth is that he is running away from countless lawsuits - by the way, I won a lawsuit against him.

When I sued him he first dismissed it as saying he had some sort of superpower, or things written and recorded against me. I knew later from other people suing him it is his modus operandi. I imagine a crook like him actually deals with other crooks and he may actually have compromising stuff about some people, but since I am a honest person, i went to court and said "bring it on"! Nothing ever came, because he had nothing.

The strange thing is that he actually believes he has superpowers, Mafia-like connections, a networking that includes everyone, Bill Gates and God. He is delusional and a psychopath. During the short period I was working with him (it took just 40 days to realize I was risking my reputation just by being related to him), I heard him more than once implying he had someone spanked by threatening to sue him, and even for not selling a domain name to him.

While I believe he never did such things (he's a pu**y, although he claims several black belts in martial arts), it was uncomfortable to hear such things. The same way it was uncomfortable to hear gross stuff like comments about the sexual life of the body of female customers or coworkers, or how he used prostitutes to close business deals, mocking remarks about the sexuality of business partners.

Before I continue with warnings and stories about his criminal career, let me fill the purpose of the site and say how he scammed me. I was working at a large software company in the United States when he invited me to work at a startup dealing with e-commerce and mobile payments - the same scam company user DeeGlass mentions in his complaint here at Rip-Off report.

He convinced me the business was sound by telling me about his peers (poor DeeGlass was one of them), and mostly about his investors, that included some well-known millionaires from Advertising and Real Estate. He was at the time using a large meeting room at one of the leading advertising agencies in Brazil, which lent his scam even more credibility.

It was, I learned later, his usual scam. Since leaving Submarino he used his claims of being a business genius and an Internet pioneer to offer some variation of this:

1 - The victim companies should name him CEO, VP, partner or some other fancy title
2 - He would claim not to need a salary; he would create innovative revenue streams and keep a share of those
3 - He would use his (at the surface impressive, but actually shallow) networking to work magic, like he was some sort of super lobbyist
4 - Of course, for delivering he would need total powers to hire, fire, change business practices and (here's the catch) a fat account for business expenses

What would happen at varying degrees of stealing and for varying periods of time:

1 - He would embezzle funds any way he could
2 - He would use the name of the current victim to enhance his reputation, usually by using the PR structure of the victim to spread lots of press-releases with his revolutionary bullsh*t
3 - He would use the most part of his time looking for the next victim and using the name of the current victim to lend him credibility

After basically destroying whatever business the victim had, someone would find his money stealing schemes and fire him. Few of those large victims would sue him, because the people hiring him would usually be very embarrassed or even fearing for their jobs for having hired such a low crook. So he could repeat the cycle at will.

He was fired by Submarino in 2000, but his LinkedIn profile states he was part of the company until 2005. It is a lie. By that standard I am a shareholder at some Fortune 500 companies. He also claims to be a millionaire from those shares. Another lie, he had some common stock compensation program that gave him some chump change that he burnt long ago.

After being fired from Submarino he kept jumping from victim to victim, never staying more than a year or so. Just check his Linkedin profile to follow the trail.
His latest stunt is to retweet a lot of famous people on Twitter, to look well connected. He claims to be a religious person now too, and retweets a lot of stuff from the Pope and from Reverend Run, formerly a rapper from Run DMS (go figure).

Marcelo Ballona would be a joke, but he is actually a criminal and a sociopath. Stay away from him. He is not diseased, he is a disease.