Sentenced, Fled, Caught Under a Kitchen Sink: Inside Mallorca's Lujocasa Fraud
14 September 2026
Most real estate websites that go quiet in Mallorca are ordinary business mortality — a domain left to lapse, a one-person operation that closed. This is not one of those. This is the case of a man who sold more than 30 property developments he mostly had no right to build, spent the deposits on a casino and luxury cars, and was finally caught eight years, two flights and two arrests later.
Two companies, thirty developments, one problem
Most disappearances are mundane. But the same conditions that let a hobbyist site vanish without consequence can also let a real fraud run for years. The clearest recent example in Mallorca is the case of Carlos García Roldán, known as “Charly”, who ran a property sales operation through two companies, Lujocasa and Mallorca Investment.
As reported by the Majorca Daily Bulletin, El País and ara Balears, the operation marketed more than 30 off-plan housing developments across Mallorca and collected deposits from buyers, in amounts reported to range from around €5,000 to over €100,000 each. According to the reporting, the companies actually held rights to build on only around 7 of those developments; the rest were sold with no real prospect of ever being built. Reporting from elDiario.es and Xataka put the number of victims at around 235–240, with total losses of roughly €3.3–3.38 million.
Where the money actually went
Rather than building anything, reporting describes García Roldán spending the money on luxury cars, travel, jewellery, and over €270,000 at the Casino de Mallorca. In December 2025 the Provincial Court of the Balearic Islands sentenced him to 14 years and 9 months in prison for aggravated fraud, money laundering, membership of a criminal organisation, document falsification and punishable insolvency. A co-defendant, Michele Pilato, who reporting says lent the operation commercial credibility through his own real estate background and office, received 9 years; an architect involved was given 15 months. Court-ordered compensation was reported at over €2 million.
Reporting puts the total at roughly €3.3–3.38 million taken from around 235–240 victims — with over €270,000 of it spent at the Casino de Mallorca alone.
Caught under a kitchen sink — the second time
García Roldán did not show up to serve the sentence. As reported by IB3 and the Majorca Daily Bulletin, he fled immediately after sentencing in December 2025 and spent roughly nine months on the run, until Guardia Civil officers raided his mother’s house in Calella, Barcelona on 10 September 2026 and found him hiding in a recess under the kitchen sink. He was remanded in custody. This was reportedly the second time he had fled a Spanish investigation into the same conduct: he had already fled to Colombia in 2018, was arrested there in 2019, and was extradited back to Spain to face trial — meaning a single case took roughly eight years, two flights and two arrests to resolve.
Nothing in this reporting suggests Lujocasa or Mallorca Investment held a legitimate registration, a verifiable track record, or the land and licences needed to build what they were selling. Those are exactly the things our checklist for checking out a real estate agent asks you to verify before you trust anyone with a viewing, let alone a deposit. We are not saying any of that checklist would have caught this specific case with certainty — only that it is asking the right questions, and that a scheme like this collects on people who never asked them.
How to not become the 241st victim
Nothing about Lujocasa or Mallorca Investment would have looked obviously fake from the outside — that is exactly what makes this case worth reading. The defence is not intuition, it is verification: confirm the entity is really registered, confirm it holds the licences and land rights it claims, and check its track record independently rather than taking a sales pitch's word for it. We cover the practical steps for this in detail in our guide, how to check out a real estate agent in Mallorca.
This case is one entry in a wider pattern of Mallorca real estate storefronts that appear and disappear — see our full tracked list. See every agency listing in Mallorca, and how much stock each carries, on our Agencies page. If you would rather we introduce you to a vetted partner agent, use Connect with an agent.