According to government records in the UK and Curaçao, Michiel Van Der Klooster is the sole director and sole shareholder of Lotto Billions, a somewhat suspect lottery betting operation targeting Brazil.
In recent weeks there has been doubt cast upon the authenticity of this company and its true motives.
With notorious con man Nooreddin Valimahomed and business failure Edoardo Paluan claiming to be the co-founders and Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Product Officer respectively, it is decidedly odd that they remain anonymous on official documents relating to the company.
Even stranger is the fact that according to Lotto Billions, the rest of the “team” is made up of reprobates who have deep and long-standing connections to Valimahomed and his previous unethical dealings including his two favourite partners in crime, disgraced lawyer Khalid Virani and fellow con man Andrew Sean Collinge.
With a bunch of shady characters in the background, it would not be a stretch to suspect that Michiel is a puppet frontman, put in place to give the business a respectable veneer.
Van Der Klooster is learning that when you put yourself in the firing line overseeing a gang of crooks and failures, your own reputation comes under scrutiny. Not the best thing for Van Der Klooster, whose claim to fame is physically abusing his wife.
But being a particularly resourceful chap, Van Der Klooster came up with a brainwave. Why not use Search Engine Optimisation and GDPR to try to improve his online image? Unfortunately for him, using GDPR to suppress news stories and links that reveal very specific information only works in the EU.
Not much use if you’re trying to raise your professional profile in South America and other emerging markets. So even after putting this “brilliant” plan into action, Google searches using his name in Brazil and the rest of the world still show stories about his convictions for domestic violence as the most relevant results. This contrasts with searches performed in the EU, where the top results feature his property asset companies, a bunch of recently activated social media profiles, and a newly created website (www.vanderklooster.com) showing nothing more than his name!
It appears his clumsy and transparent SEO campaign to try to clean up his online image will not benefit him or the fiasco that is Lotto Billions.
Van Der Klooster must rue the day he got into bed with the unscrupulous Valimahomed and his band of brothers. But there again, Valimahomed is probably regretting choosing a convicted wife beater to be the “clean face” of his latest commercial scam.
The moral of this story is check who you are doing business with before you sign on the dotted line, because if you lay with dogs, you will catch fleas!
