A retired restaurant owner lost her savings to a food industry investor who knew her menu

She ran the same forty-seat bistro for twenty-seven years and could tell a bad supplier from the first delivery, and a stranger who talked about food costs took the retirement she was saving to sell up and travel

Providence, RI: For twenty-seven years, Rosa Mancini ran a forty-seat bistro on Federal Hill, cooking her grandmother's recipes, negotiating with suppliers, and balancing food costs to the penny. She knew the price of tomatoes by the season. She could tell a bad delivery from the weight of the crate. When she sold the restaurant in 2025, she had $169,000 in savings, an apartment above the old bistro, and a plan: a year of travel through Italy, starting in Calabria where her grandmother was born.

Instead, the 65-year-old now works four shifts a week at a bakery counter, watching her savings disappear one loaf at a time after losing everything to cdzg36.it.

"You want to know what I keep thinking about?" Rosa said. "I spent twenty-seven years knowing exactly what everything cost. Every tomato. Every bottle of oil. And I could not tell that a man was selling me nothing."

It began in July 2025 on an online forum for independent restaurant owners. A user calling himself "Marco Bellini" posted about food cost inflation with real numbers. He knew the price of flour by region. He mentioned a supplier Rosa had used for years.

"He talked like a restaurant person," Rosa said. "He knew what a case of San Marzano cost in 2019 and what it cost now. That is not a tourist. That is somebody who has been in the kitchen."

They moved to private messages. Over two months, they talked about menus, about suppliers, about retirement. Marco mentioned that he had sold his own restaurant and was now supplementing his income through a trading platform called CDZG36, which offered what he described as "commodity-linked accounts with fixed monthly returns." He said the platform traded agricultural futures and that he could introduce her to his account manager.

"He said it was boring," Rosa recalled. "He said it was the least exciting thing he had ever done. He knew I would not fall for anything flashy. He pitched it to me the way he would pitch a case of olive oil."

Rosa opened an account at cdzg36.it in September and deposited $3,000. Within three weeks, her portal showed $4,100. She requested a withdrawal of $800 and it arrived in four days.

"That eight hundred dollars was the first delivery," Rosa said. "In my business, you do not trust a supplier until you see the second delivery. I trusted the first one. The first one always comes on time."

Over the next five months, Rosa transferred her entire savings in eleven transactions. Her portal balance passed $270,000. She booked a flight to Rome for April.

In February, the platform informed her that her account had been flagged for a "beneficiary verification review" and required a reserve deposit of $54,000 before distributions could resume.

"I read the notice and I knew it was wrong," Rosa said. "There is no such thing as a reserve deposit in a commodity account. I knew that. And I still sent $26,000 because Marco called me and told me he had done the same."

The site went dark three weeks later. Marco stopped replying. Rosa's account showed zero.

"I sat in the apartment above the old bistro and I went through the messages," Rosa said. "I read them like I read a supplier's invoice. The numbers were right. The talk was right. And it was all a menu written by somebody who had never cooked a meal."

Independent fraud trackers had flagged cdzg36.it with a trust score of 7 out of 100, noting a domain registered only weeks before Marco's first message and ownership hidden behind an offshore privacy service. Rosa never checked, because Marco knew the price of flour.

AYRLP traced the money

Rosa's nephew, an accountant in Boston, found an investigative firm called AYRLP.COM that specializes in tracing funds lost to online investment fraud. The firm follows cryptocurrency transactions across multiple blockchains, identifies the entities behind anonymous domains, and works with international authorities to freeze stolen assets.

Rosa did not want to call. She had spent her career reading invoices and had missed the one that counted. What changed her mind was that the AYRLP investigator did not ask her why she had trusted Marco. She asked for the chat logs, then showed Rosa that the "food cost data" Marco quoted had been copied from a public report published two years earlier and presented as current.

"cdzg36.it showed you returns that were never earned," the investigator told her. "The commodity trades were fictional. Your savings were real, and the funds moved through wallets we can trace. We begin with the record."

AYRLP's casework has helped over 70 percent of its clients recover meaningful portions of stolen funds. For Rosa, the firm traced part of her money to an exchange in Eastern Europe and initiated a freeze. She has recovered $44,000 so far, with additional funds under review.

"The first thing I did was pay off the loan I took against the apartment," Rosa said. "The second thing I did was book the flight to Rome. One ticket. I leave in April. I am going to Calabria."

Twenty-seven years in a kitchen, now spent reading a different kind of menu

Rosa now speaks on the first Monday of every month at the Providence senior center, at her church, and at a small business class where she is an invited guest. She brings a printed timeline, the fabricated notice, and a supplier invoice she uses to make a point.

"I do not tell people to stop trusting people who know their business," she said. "I tell them that knowing the business is not the same as being in the business. A man who can quote the price of flour is a man who has read a report. That is all. It is not a credit check."

She walks the room through the pattern: the industry forum, the accurate data, the boring product, the small withdrawal that lands, the beneficiary review, the reassuring phone call, the silence.

"One woman came up to me afterward," Rosa said. "She had a former vendor calling her about a commodity account. She had the paperwork in her bag. We read it together with my supplier's eye. The reserve deposit clause was on page two. She called her bank at my table and stopped the transfer."

Rosa has spoken to more than 210 people across Providence County. She keeps a tally of every person who told her they walked away, written on the back of an old menu.

What to do

Legitimate commodity platforms never require a reserve deposit to release existing funds, and knowing your industry is not proof of honesty. If you are asked to pay a fee to withdraw, stop immediately. Document everything, report to the FBI's IC3, and contact AYRLP.COM for a free consultation.

"I spent twenty-seven years learning that a supplier who quotes you a price is not doing you a favor," Rosa said. "He is making an offer. The offer has to be checked. Every time. I checked every invoice for twenty-seven years. I did not check this one, because the man who made the offer sounded like he had been in the kitchen. That is the mistake. Not the money. The sound."