SANTA FE.— He said he was a lawyer. His mother believed him until it was proven that he had died since he entered the university in 2014 He only took 13 law subjects. But he was convinced that he was a lawyer and created a farce with which he deceived not only family and friends, but also clients. To achieve this goal, he forged digital signatures of judges and chambermaids as well as court documents, which he used to defraud clients of approximately $54,000,000.
The case is being intensively discussed, especially in the interior of the country, Not only because this man lives from Sunchales and is identified as Juan Andrés Zurvera, 31 years oldHe is a fraud, but because he became the first vice president of the Unión club in this western Santa Fe city, where he enjoyed prestige and sympathy.
For this reason, upon learning of the incident, the institution issued a statement in which it indicated that it was completely unaware of the facts raised in the case, which were of a purely personal nature, and clarified that no member of the board was connected to the circumstances under investigation or had prior knowledge of them.
It also does not go unnoticed that the accused led his mother, family and friends to believe that he was a lawyer, when in reality he had only taken 13 courses at the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences of the National University of the Litoral (UNL) in the provincial capital.
This week, prosecutor Guillermo Loyola Zurvera formally filed charges of fraud, abuse of office and falsification of public documents.
According to research that goes beyond these lies, Investigators managed to trace the $54,000,000 that Zurvera received over the course of three yearsBetween January and November 2025 alone, $18,000,000 went into their pockets, which corresponds to their customers’ remittances.
The researchers detailed that the Procedure The idea was to lure people with urgent legal needs and demand advance payments from them on fees and operating costs for lawsuits or proceedings that were never actually initiated. This way, The fake professional managed to delay his victims’ claims while continuing to receive payments illegally.
After a detailed investigation and with the evidence presented in the case, prosecutor Loyola of the Prosecutor’s Office (MPA) of the courts in Rafaela stated, He was charged with a total of ten offenses and the criminal judge Javier Bottero placed the false lawyer in preventive detention without a period of time while elements and witness statements were added to the case.
The defendant, who posed as a lawyer in Sunchales, In the end, he broke down in the face of the evidence against him: he cried in front of the prosecutor and told a story of personal frustration and his family, resulting in a lie that his mother, friends and victims believed.
From the courts by Rafaela, LA NACION has been informed that of the 10 complaints has been ratified Two more were added in due course, from victims who came forward last Monday and others currently under investigation who could appear before the end of the year.
But Zurvera’s story, beyond the specific facts, involves enormous emotional and financial fraud, exceeding $54,000,000.
According to the research Zurvera managed to convince a professional who has a law firm in Sunchales that focuses primarily on labor disputes.to join their service and open the firm to other types of cases, mainly related to family law.
Zurvera told the professional that he graduated from the National University of the Litoral in October last year, although in reality he only took 13 subjects, less than half of the subjects required to graduate.
But for the judiciary, psychological or sentimental reasons are not enough to justify the commission of crimes. On this basis, prosecutor Loyola accused him of being responsible for repeated frauds in the royal competition, falsification of public documents and usurpation of titles.
As other sources in the fraud group indicate, this was more of an emotional fraud than an economic one.
One victim added: “This boy believed his own lie. You cannot imagine the damage the discovery of this deception has caused us: Yes, we need the money, but the worst thing is the emotional betrayal. And I ask Juan to think about what he did: I hope that you can do it someday,” said the woman.
Criminal lawyer Sergio Fregona, Zurvera’s defense attorney, attempted to distance the defendant from the allegation of fraud, although his efforts were unsuccessful due to the strength of the evidence presented by the prosecution.
“We have already heard the victims say that they even had to go into debt to be able to make the payments,” the judge argued in the resolution, also recalling that Zurvera carried out a scheme by posing as a lawyer; submitted writings that they attribute to secretaries or judges; This scheme created errors for the victims and allowed them to obtain property protection. Even a 13-major law student can see that these cases were fraudulent,” he pointed out.
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