Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego lost $5.5B in a global loan scam linked to fake Astor heirs. The scheme exposed serious risks in securities-based lending.
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| A high-stakes scam using fake Astor family ties cost Mexico’s Salinas Pliego billions, revealing deep flaws in global securities lending and digital finance. Image: CH |
MEXICO CITY, Mexico — July 30, 2025:
Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego has lost approximately $5.5 billion in a sweeping international scam that lured him with the illusion of elite heritage, financial prestige, and a false promise of low-risk capital. The scheme, which misused the Astor family name, not only erased nearly a quarter of his $16 billion fortune but also triggered a major collapse in the stock value of Grupo Elektra, his flagship company.
Salinas Pliego, chairman of Grupo Salinas and one of Latin America’s richest men, was drawn into the scam in 2021 when he sought to borrow $400 million against his Grupo Elektra shares to fund a Bitcoin investment. The offer came from Astor Capital Fund, a firm falsely claiming lineage to the iconic American Astor family. The con artists behind the firm created elaborate promotional materials, faked office addresses, and operated under names like “Thomas Astor Mellon” and “Gregory Mitchell.”
In reality, “Thomas Astor Mellon” was Alexey Skachkov, a Georgian-based Ukrainian national with a criminal record. The operation was led by Vladimir Sklarov, a Ukrainian-born American fraudster previously convicted for an $18 million Medicare scam in the 1990s. Sklarov used aliases including “Gregory Mitchell” and “Mark Simon Bentley” to mask his identity.
By mid-2024, the fraudsters had sold Salinas Pliego’s Elektra shares on the open market, causing the stock to crash by 71% in July. The fallout wiped out $5.5 billion of his personal wealth and $4 billion from Elektra’s market value. “I feel like an absolute idiot. How could I fall for this?” Salinas Pliego, 69, admitted in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
The stolen funds were traced to luxury assets including a $6.45 million Manhattan penthouse, a $2.67 million estate in Virginia, a $6 million château in France, and multiple villas in Greece. Sklarov now reportedly lives in Greece aboard a yacht named Enchantment, denying any wrongdoing while claiming that borrowers understood the terms of collateralized stock lending.
Warning signs had emerged as early as 2021 when Salinas Pliego’s team noticed erratic trading activity in Elektra shares. However, reassurances from Astor Capital, along with visits to polished but fake offices in New York, delayed intervention. When Salinas Pliego tried to repay the loan in July 2024, the firm issued a default notice, citing supposed contractual breaches and referencing a Mexican government probe into his business dealings.
The Journal further revealed that Salinas Pliego was one of many victims. Sklarov’s syndicate allegedly managed $750 million in collateralized shares from targets across the U.S., U.K., and Asia. Other fake financial entities used in the operation included “Cornelius Vanderbilt Capital Management,” suggesting a broader pattern of exploiting the names of historic dynasties to cultivate false legitimacy.
The case has cast a harsh spotlight on the $4.3 trillion global securities-based lending market, where minimal oversight allows bad actors to operate with impunity. Deloitte and other analysts have long warned of regulatory blind spots in this sector.
Salinas Pliego’s legal team has since frozen $400 million in a London court and is tracing the diverted funds through a network of offshore accounts, some facilitated by Sklarov’s New York-based attorney. The billionaire has vowed to pursue full restitution but acknowledged the damage done.
“I trusted the wrong people,” he said. “And the cost was monumental—not just in money, but in reputation.”
As digital finance grows more sophisticated, the Salinas Pliego case is likely to become a textbook example of how trust, legacy branding, and regulatory loopholes can be weaponized against even the most seasoned investors. Whether it spurs reform in the securities lending industry remains to be seen.