Cecilia Calixto was arrested in Brazil alongside her boyfriend Matheus Almeida after she shared her spending sprees on Instagram despite being unable to explain her fortune
A drug dealer has been busted after his girlfriend documented their glamorous life on Instagram whilst she was on a sales assistant wage.
Matheus Almeida, from Brazil, has long been suspected of running a huge drug empire in Sao Paulo but has never been caught. But police finally got a break in the case after they turned their attention to his girlfriend Cecilia Calixto. The 28-year-old, whose only source of income is a small clothes shop in her mother’s house, posted her luxury lifestyle to her followers. Her posts included lavish spending sprees and expensive holidays.
She even posted multiple plastic surgery updates and aesthetic procedures on her Instagram. Within the space of a few months, Calixto underwent a rhinoplasty, had silicone boob implants and amended her curves with HD liposuction. The sales assistant also splurged out on gold necklaces with encrusted diamonds.
Calixto further boasted about her extravagant car collection despite having no means of such income. And when police linked her to drugs boss Almeida, it reportedly emerged that she had paid for the lot as his secret bookkeeper. Almeida had long evaded capture since he worked as a middleman and rarely handled drug shipments himself, police said. Instead, he used a small army of couriers and mules to deliver the orders to his customers all over South America, reports local media.
Police said his girlfriend used front companies and a technique called ‘smurfing’, using multiple bank accounts to spread the illegal cash around to avoid detection. The cash flow was enormous, with the gang constantly exchanging information about the progress of the money, with prosecutors. As the main financial operator of the scheme, Calixto managed the entire fortune made from drug sales.
Over a year she received £71,900 in her account, with her partner being the primary recipient of the debits. Whilst her clothes shop’s annual gross revenue was estimated at £10,060, it received £71,900 between August 2020 and August 2021. In October 2021 alone, Calixto saw another £43,000 deposited into her bank accounts. Almeida, too, liked to show off on social media and was known for wearing a solid gold chain with a diamond-encrusted pendant in the shape of Christ’s face.
He was a regular at celebrity and VIP parties where police suspected his drugs were supplied. On Thursday, authorities in Brazil arrested the couple after they discovered they were joint heads of an enormous drug trafficking scam, according to local media. 17 other suspects that have been linked to the pair are now being investigated by the police.
