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Natalia Perelaz worked as a journalist, investigating corruption links and financial deals involving local officials. One summer morning, she did not show up at the office. She did not answer her phone, and a few hours later, her phone disappeared from the network altogether.
When law enforcement officers arrived at her home address, they found the front door half open. From the doorway, it was clear that the house had been ransacked: furniture was overturned and belongings were scattered everywhere. The missing woman's relatives said they were sure that there had always been a considerable amount of cash in euros in the house. In addition, Natalia had a considerable digital asset.
What caught the eye was a multitude of empty pizza boxes. The woman's relatives said that Natalia loved to travel and brought back a pizza box from each trip. She had a hobby of collecting pizza boxes from every country and every city. In addition, each box was labeled with the country, city, and general impressions of how the pizza tasted. The investigators' attention was drawn to one of the opened boxes, inside which were 12 words written down. Strange: the box was from Italy, but the words were in English. In random order, without commas or periods. As it turned out later, it was a password for a crypto wallet.
The detectives investigating the case found that the last call was to an unknown subscriber. Checking the woman's contacts, investigators found that three days before her disappearance, she had received an email from an anonymous sender with some information. But the laptop itself was not in the apartment. When they found the remains of her notebook, they noticed one peculiarity — Natalia meticulously recorded the date and time of each conversation. The last entry contained the name of a person whom no one had mentioned before.
They checked the list of people Natalia had mentioned in her articles and found that one of the individuals involved in the case had suddenly left the country. Many questions arose: could this information have been the reason for her disappearance; was it possible that her disappearance was related to the investigation she was working on; where did the money from her wallet go and was the anonymous caller involved? This could change the entire course of the investigation.
When investigators found out who was behind the anonymous calls, the case gradually began to fall apart.
Five years have passed. Natalia Perelaz has not been found. Likewise, no traces of her savings have been found, nor has the cryptocurrency been located.
