Phantom cows spark $350m Uruguay scam

Sandra Palleiro is on the hunt for her lost cows. The 60-year-old accountant is standing in a muddy field at the end of a farm track in Uruguay’s remote border region with Brazil.

- 

She has travelled 600 kilometres (370 miles) from the capital, Montevideo, to find 61 cattle she owns, at least on paper. The missing bovines were part of a “cow bond” scheme that has collapsed, causing one of Uruguay's biggest ever financial scandals.

The co-owner of one Uruguayan firm that took money from savers to invest in cows has died by suicide. Three companies have gone bust and are under investigation for fraud.

"Hello moo-moo! Could one of you be mine?” Palleiro called out hopefully into a paddock in the border region of Artigas, her jeans caked in mud as she approached a wire fence to get a closer look at the cows.

Palleiro -like hundreds of other investors -is unable to find the animals she owns or prove they even exist, making them part of a herd of “phantom cows” that could number over 700,000 head of cattle. So far, the losses have mounted to some $350 million, roiling the stable farming nation, home to just 3.4 million people - but 12 million cows.

It has also sent shockwaves through bigger ranching neighbours Argentina and Brazil, which looked to Uruguay's cattle-tracking system as a model and where similar livestock investment schemes operate.

In March 2024, Palleiro put her life savings of over $50,000 into the livestock investment scheme offered by a local firm named Conexión Ganadera, lured by promises of fixed 7-10 dollar returns and investment materials with bucolic pictures of brown-and-white Hereford cattle.