Originally Syndicated on May 16, 2023 @ 7:23 am
Didac Sanchez, sometimes known as Ddac Sánchez, is a Spanish businessman and the founder of Eliminalia, a firm that offers services for protecting digital privacy and managing online reputation. The media accused him of employing unscrupulous methods to remove damaging and undesired content from the internet.
About Didac Sanchez
Didac Sanchez claims that he was born in the Raval district of Barcelona, Spain, in 1992. He and his sisters were raised at a residence for minors under the direction of the government of Catalonia.
Eliminalia, a reputation management business, was started by Didac Sanchez in 2011. Before that, he founded Legisdalia, a data protection specialist. Didac Sanchez ran for the position of head of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce in 2014.
The last unreadable World War II communication with geographic coordinates was decrypted in 2015 by Didac Sanchez. He released software in 2016 that made it possible to encrypt calls, texts, documents, and conversations on WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS, Skype, and Telegram, as well as any other form of communication.
Didac Sanchez Critisicm
Didac Sanchez worked for more than 1,500 people between 2015 and 2021 to delete personal data from the internet and publications, according to the hacked files that were released and examined by European journalists.
What is Eliminalia?
Eliminalia is a Spanish reputation management organization that changed its name to “Idata Protection” in January 2023. Didac Sanchez, often known as Ddac Sánche, started it in 2011. Ukraine’s Kyiv is home to technical offices. The Miami-based holding company Maidan Holdings owns Eliminalia.
An NGO devoted to the protection of digital rights called Qurium [es] accused Eliminalia of building a network of phony websites with out-of-date content and then bombarding those sites with official DMCA takedown notices and GDPR complaints in 2021. These were used to remove reports about Isabel dos Santos and Vincent Miclet being involved in corruption in Angola.
Blackhat techniques used by Eliminalia aid criminals all around the world in erasing their past
Two of them are recognized narcotics dealers. One is accused of using money laundering techniques to support a prostitution ring. Another provided the Syrian government with American equipment. Three additional people have been charged with participating in a cryptocurrency fraud that cost investors billions of dollars.
These are just a few of the more than 1,400 customers who have used Eliminalia, a reputation management business that claims to “erase your past,” including many who have been found guilty or suspected of crimes.
Eliminalia, a company based in Barcelona, has been cleaning up its reputation for ten years. The business has grown to become a prominent participant in the global disinformation-for-hire market from a wood-paneled coworking space it occupies with two dozen other tenants in the famed Portal de l’Ngel retail district.
Didac Sanchez, a 30-year-old Spanish businessman who is said to be residing in Georgia, is the official brains behind Eliminalia. Didac Sanchez asserts ownership over a vast network of businesses, which includes a Ukrainian surrogacy agency that is being investigated for baby trafficking.
However, it appears that he established this network with Jose Maria Hill Prados, who was found guilty of assaulting him sexually when he was a juvenile. Even though Hill Prados’ name is missing from Eliminalia’s records, Spanish investigators believe he may also be in charge of reputation management.
Reporters were able to outline Eliminalia’s broad network of digital influence thanks to thousands of leaked documents that were obtained by the French non-profit Forbidden Stories and shared with numerous partners. The records provide previously unseen insight into the wide range of deceptive strategies the corporation employs to quash criticism of its clients, building on earlier findings.
The documents demonstrate that Eliminalia, which changed its name to iData Protection S.L. in late December, intimidated journalists with copyright and privacy regulations, tricked search engines to conceal information, and produced bogus news. The corporation has even launched new commercial endeavors in other nations with its criminal customers.
According to experts, Eliminalia is part of a burgeoning industry of disinformation that aids negative actors, such as criminals and kleptocrats, in concealing their murky pasts.
This whole mechanism, this commission of money and reputation laundering, this everyday kleptocracy, depends today on transnational professional intermediaries,” said Tena Prelec, an Oxford University research scholar who specializes in a transnational kleptocracy.
“You have a whole series of professional service industries, such as public relations agents, lobbyists, lawyers… who help in this repurposing of shady people, businesses, and governments as respected businesspeople and philanthropic cosmopolitans on a global scale.”
The legal counsel for Eliminalia refuses to answer inquiries for this project, claiming that many of them involved client business secrets. They charged bias against journalists.
“The vast majority of the questions’ orientation and content shows a partial and dishonorable approach,” they said.
The Eliminalia Leak: What Is It?
A reputation management company’s leak of nearly 50,000 documents was shared with dozens of media partners as well as the French organization Forbidden Stories. As part of the Story Killers project, more than 100 reporters collaborated to explore the disinformation-for-hire business.
The information includes information about Eliminalia‘s customers in 50 different nations, such as their names, the contracts they signed, and other legal documents.
This is the first opportunity for journalists to have a close-up look at one of the most significant “black hat” reputation management firms in the world.
Eliminalia’s Criminal Services
Among Didac Sanchezs various business endeavors was Subrogalia, a surrogacy agency that matched Spanish parents with Ukrainian women who potentially bear their offspring. Even though he is the company’s public face, papers discovered by OCCRP reveal that Hill Prados, who was jailed in Spain for abusing Didac Sanchez sexually as a kid, actually owned the company’s Ukrainian firm.
Eliminalia is a component of a network of at least 54 organizations connected to Hill Prados and Didac Sanchez during the previous ten years in nine different countries. Both of them declined to offer any comments on this story.
Didac Sanchez has previously stated that he founded Eliminalia to dispel rumors regarding his personal history as a Hill Prados victim.
| “It tortured me so much to find mention of what had happened in my childhood on the Internet,” he wrote in his self-published autobiography, The Secret of Success. “I set about studying how to [scrub references] and in a few weeks had succeeded in deleting most of what had been written. Thus, I saw there was a market for this and created Eliminalia.” |
As part of a growing movement to improve “right to be forgotten” regulations, some of Eliminalia‘s business comes from regular people looking to remove defamatory information posted about them online. However, reporters discovered that a large portion of the reputation manager’s clientele were criminals who used Eliminalia to bend the same laws to their advantage.
According to the internally-leaked records, Eliminalia has served over 1,400 clients, including hundreds of people who have been charged with or found guilty of crimes ranging from drug trafficking and sexual assault to fraud and money laundering.
Top customers of Didac Sanchez
- Adar Capital Partners Limited
- Riway Taiwan
- Marcelo Herdoiza
- Compagnie Banquaire Helvetique (CBH)
- Banca Privada de Andorra (BPA)
Erasing the past
Eliminalia has used legal loopholes to coerce anyone who criticizes its clients, as seen by the notifications filed against Página66. Reporters discovered that the company’s business strategy revolves around weaponizing copyright and privacy laws from the United States and the European Union.
The signature of “Raul Soto,” an apparent pseudonym used by an Eliminalia employee acting as an employee of the European Commission in Brussels, appeared on many of the emails the company sent citing privacy infractions. Qurium, a nonprofit that specializes in digital forensics, discovered the emails were sent from an IP address in Ukraine, where Eliminalia operated until the Russian invasion last year, after studying the source code of one of the emails.
The Risks of Misinformation
Eliminalia was commenting on the risks of misinformation to the European Commission while its employees were sending communications to journalists pretending to be EU officials.
In response to a request for comments on disinformation, someone writing under the name Guillem Castro Izquierdo submitted a public submission, which the commission later placed online. He issued a cautionary statement against the dissemination of “intentional misinformation to influence the judgment of citizens towards international bodies,” other citizens, and businesses.
The deceptive use of mass communication channels like social networks, television, radio, digital media, etc., he continued, is the key contributing cause. He suggested deleting content and “filtering” news sources.
In response to its request for feedback, the European Commission claimed to have received 3,000 public submissions. Eliminalia‘s response to the consultation was one of many,” a spokesman said.
