Brazil charges 31 people in major carbon credit fraud investigation

https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/11/brazil-charges-31-people-in-major-carbon-credit-fraud-investigation/

by PaulHoule • 8 months ago

67 22 8 months ago

news.mongabay.com

vkou2• 8 months ago

The police investigation confirmed that two REDD+ project areas were generating carbon credits at the same time they were being used to launder timber taken from other illegally deforested areas.
Both projects, which cover more than 140,000 hectares (around 350,000 acres), are located in the municipality of Lábrea in the south of Amazonas state. The area has been identified as one of the newest and most aggressive deforestation frontiers in the Brazilian Amazon.
...led by Élcio Aparecido Moço and José Luiz Capelasso.
In 2017, Moço had been sentenced for timber laundering, but in 2019, another court overruled his sentencing. In 2019, he was also indicted for allegedly bribing two public officials.

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It's strange that a conman doesn't seem to be able to change his spots.

onionisafruit• 8 months ago

Ironically confidence men often get caught when they have too much confidence in themselves.

staplers• 8 months ago

Will they line these people up in the street and kill them like they did to 100+ people for a low-level drug dealer "sweep"?

Something tells me not. The global push toward hyper-violent policing feels one sided class wise.

vkou2• 8 months ago

Looking at the track record of everyone involved, they'll be tried, convicted, and released to pull the con off again - but perhaps someone from Brazil can chime in and tell us that something's changed in the past year with respect to white collar crime prosecutions.

brazukadev2• 8 months ago

As a Brazilian I'd say we are seeing quite the increase of white collar schemes busted, just this week a prominent banker was jailed and his bank liquidated.

mono4422• 8 months ago

Did they even really do anything wrong? This whole emission trading thing is a bordeline scam anyway, they just didn't have the right connections so they weren't allowed to profit from this and got caught.

nebezb• 8 months ago

People have been buying fake carbon credits for a long time. There’s very little incentive to validate the authenticity of the credit/offset. The press release is usually all the value they’re looking for.

I’ve only just now heard of someone getting in trouble for selling them. It’s about time.

bryanlarsen• 8 months ago

OTOH there are lots of people who are interested in selling genuine carbon credits. They are pressuring governments to clean up this market. It's a hard coordination problem, since we don't have a unified world government. (Thankfully).

calmbell• 8 months ago

There should be a world standard or standards for genuine carbon credits. Maybe the UN could create an agency that determines such a standard and verifies that carbon credits meet that standard.

engineer_22• 8 months ago

It's a hard coordination problem because, like sea shells or glass beads, CO2 is not a good store of capital.

shrubble• 8 months ago

It’s laden with fraud everywhere, sadly. US regulators like SEC have no interest in auditing, from what I’ve seen. “Spice must flow” attitude.

worik2• 8 months ago

I get very frustrated by "carbon credits". This is an example of criminal fraud. But the whole idea is begging for fraud. It is a fraudulent concept from start to finish

Reminds me of the Catholic's concept of "indulgences". Sin the sins, pay a fee, and go to heaven.

In this case the "sins", and the sinners, are burning the world for profit

netsharc• 8 months ago

This is probably a misunderstanding of mine, but I fear that it isn't: "Oh, if I can quantify the square meters of forest absorbing CO2, someone will pay me money per sqm? Then let me map how many sqm this forest has, which been here and doing that absorbing since millenia, and someone somewhere in the industrialized world can now pollute and say the x sqm they've paid for is offsetting their pollution!"...

worik2• 8 months ago

A simplification yes, misunderstanding no.

Add selling the same square meter many times

cheschire• 8 months ago

Remember how people used to talk about the environment and stuff, back before AI made everyone turn a hard 180?

What place do carbon credits even have anymore in this economy?

mono4422• 8 months ago

European Union forces some sectors to buy permits for co2 emissions.

Natsu• 8 months ago

A lot of pro-environment people are reconsidering nuclear these days and were even before things like AI started demanding more electricity because it doesn't involve burning more hydrocarbons.

_trampeltier• 8 months ago

Don't are they all? It would be almost more newsworthy if somebody could present a bit bigger serious carbon credit thing.

j8hn2• 8 months ago

Just a reminder that Brazil bulldozed parts of the protected Amazon rainforest to build a 4 lane highway for the COP 30 climate summit this year. Thousands (50,000?) of "climate champions" burned millions of liters of fossil jet fuel flying from around the world (many on private jets), then drove on a freshly bulldozed highway through cleared Amazon land. Seems a bit ironic.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9vy191rgn1o

Brazil is also bulldozing large swaths of the rainforest to build thousands of kilometers of roads to sea ports to access trade routes with China.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazils-lula-backs-hi...

Oh yeah, Lula wants rich nations to pay billions of dollars to Brazil annually to protect the rainforest.

brazukadev2• 8 months ago

Do you know that millions of people live in that jungle, the Amazon rainforest? People that need to go to work, need to transport food, goods? Lula want to end the poverty there and this won't happen without bringing a bit of "development". Thousands (not even that actually) of kilometers is nothing compared to the 7 million kilometers of PRESERVED rainforest (the biggest preserved rainforest in the world, with the costs paid mostly by Brazilians).

j8hn2• 8 months ago

The "bit" of development is massive deforestation by 2030 equal to the size of the state of Florida, according to the linked Reuters article.

Lula ran on a platform to preserve the rainforest and reverse deforestation, yet his policies are leading to the catastrophic devastation of it.

Brazil charges 31 people in major carbon credit fraud investigation

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