Organized gang dismantled after targeting ride-app drivers with fake trips and stolen phones

The pattern was unmistakable once investigators saw it whole. A gang would request rides through the Maxim app, directing drivers to the same isolated corners of Las Heras—the alleyways near Moyano and Olascoaga, in a neighborhood called Resguardo. When the drivers arrived, armed men would force them out of their cars, threaten them with guns and knives, steal their cash and phones, and sometimes force them to authorize bank transfers while held at gunpoint. What made this operation different from ordinary street robbery was what happened next: the stolen phones became tools. Gang members would use the drivers' own devices to book new rides, luring fresh victims into the same trap. For months, this cycle repeated. The Maxim drivers kept coming. The robberies kept happening. The phones kept circulating through the criminal network like currency.

It took a large-scale investigation led by prosecutor Daniel Sánchez Giol, who specializes in robbery and auto theft, to see the architecture underneath. Detectives from the Las Heras unit and uniformed officers had been tracking at least eight incidents that followed an identical script. The breakthrough came from following the phones themselves—analyzing which stolen devices were used to make which ride requests, cross-referencing communication records, reviewing security camera footage, and running fingerprint analysis. The digital trail connected crimes that had initially seemed separate. It revealed not a loose group of opportunists but an organized structure with planning, territory, and logistics.

On Thursday, May 14th, police executed 21 simultaneous raids. The primary target was the Todos Unidos settlement, though officers also searched other addresses across the city and Las Heras. They arrested Jonathan Jesús González Moyano, 23 years old, identified as the suspected leader of the organization. They also detained several other suspects, seized one revolver, and gathered additional evidence. By the end of the day, at least five other people connected to the robberies were already in custody, along with two others arrested for illegal weapons possession and one for assault and battery.

González Moyano's history suggested he was capable of exactly this kind of violence. In January 2020, when he was 17 and being held in police custody, he attacked a doctor who was examining him and escaped by jumping from a first-floor window onto San Lorenzo Street. That incident remained vivid in police memory. Now, six years later and with a criminal record stretching back to adolescence, he found himself at the center of a major investigation again—this time facing charges of aggravated robbery and potentially criminal association, a more serious charge that prosecutors were considering.

Another name appeared repeatedly in the case file: Rodrigo Emanuel Botta, who was already in detention when this week's operations unfolded. Botta was also suspected of participating in a violent armed robbery at a barbershop in Godoy Cruz on May 9th of the previous year. Security cameras recorded three armed men entering the shop and fleeing while firing shots. Investigators believed González Moyano and Botta were directly involved in that incident, and it became part of the larger criminal profile the prosecution was assembling.

The investigative work had been methodical and patient. Detectives spent months cross-referencing information from multiple robbery cases, tracking patterns in timing, location, victim profiles, and the specific phones used in each crime. The repeated use of the Moyano and Olascoaga alleyways as attack sites, combined with the technological evidence of phone reuse, solidified the hypothesis that this was not random street crime but an organized gang operating on familiar territory with advance planning. The level of coordination—selecting victims, forcing bank transfers under threat, recycling stolen devices to book new targets—suggested a sophistication that went well beyond improvised robbery.

Now the case enters a critical phase. The prosecution is analyzing the complete structure of the group and has not ruled out escalating to more serious charges. The drivers who were robbed, threatened, and coerced into transferring their money remain the human center of this story, though their names and individual accounts have not been detailed in the investigation's public record. What is clear is that for months, they were systematically targeted by a criminal organization that had refined its methods into a repeatable, profitable system—until the pattern itself became the evidence that brought it down.