^{All names besides José's have been changed by RTL.}

José Sanchez-Lopez bought his apartment in a 1970s building in Kirchberg in March 2025, and set aside €80,000 to renovate it right after the purchase. Months later he was locked out of a gutted flat, down half his budget, with a mortgage he can't escape and a contractor who had vanished.

The plan had been straightforward: knocking down one wall, redoing the bathrooms, installing a new kitchen. Tight against his budget, but workable.

As soon as he had the keys, Sanchez began looking for contractors, first by posting on Facebook for recommendations – in a group for Spanish speakers in Luxembourg. That's where a man, who introduced himself as Alejandro, a Bolivian national, reached out.

"He approached me and told me he could help", Sanchez-Lopez says.

Going through official channels mattered for Sanchez-Lopez from the start – paying taxes, paying workers fairly, going by the book. He says Alejandro assured him everything would be done accordingly, and the two began negotiating terms, mostly through WhatsApp messages and calls.

The full job, paid in six phases as work progressed, would come to just over €60,000.

Multiple companies raised the first red flags

What Sanchez describes next is, by his account, a pattern of shifting paperwork that should have been a clearer warning sign than it was at the time.

Sanchez-Lopez says his confidence in Alejandro was wavering by this point, but Alejandro pushed back – sharing voice memos from other collaborators and contacts he said would vouch for him. The two agreed to move away from an upfront payment of 40% and toward the six-phase structure instead.

In early September 2025, Alejandro received the keys to the apartment.

Work began with demolition. But Alejandro soon insisted the job would be more extensive than planned: the flooring would have to be torn up to replace the pipes and electrical cables underneath – work he claimed had been included in the price from the start. He then began pressuring Sanchez-Lopez to skip the agreed phased payments, saying he needed the money to bring in extra workers and to order materials for later stages, such as the blinds and the kitchen. These costs, he argued, had to be covered even when there was no visible progress on site.

As September came to a close, Sanchez-Lopez had already paid almost €40,000, following insistent pressure from Alejandro – who said multiple things were being worked on in parallel, and the phased payments had to keep pace for the renovation to proceed.

Alejandro had initially said the work would be mostly done on his own, but relied on sub-contractors – an electrician and a plumber. One day in late September, Sanchez-Lopez states the plumber took him aside asking why he hadn't paid yet.

However the money for plumbing and electricity had already been transferred to Alejandro following increasing pressure. None of it, as far as Sanchez-Lopez could tell, had reached the workers.

A day later, the two confronted Alejandro.

"That was the last day I saw [him] . He told me he had a problem with the payments and he was going to pay everybody – and he disappeared."

José Sanchez-Lopez

As he looked closer at what was left, the damage became clear, going well beyond what he had expected. "He destroyed the apartment", says Sanchez-Lopez. The demolition – which was supposed to leave electrical and plumbing infrastructure intact – resulted in an apartment stripped to it's sub-flooring, with ripped up pipes, torn out heaters, and electrical cabling broken beyond repair.

"He cut the pipes, water, heating. There's no electricity", says Sanchez-Lopez.

As Alejandro stopped responding, Sanchez-Lopez filed a police complaint. He says police told him there were already other reports on file against Alejandro. However, "the police told me that they don't know where he is, so they cannot do anything", he added.

A man of many hats

RTL spoke to three other people who say they had separate dealings with Alejandro, each describing a similar arc often involving: an offer of help; money requested upfront; then, silence.

Carlos, also of Bolivian origin, says he worked with Alejandro in 2021 while working for a construction company specialised in roofing and scaffolding. He claims most of the people on sight were not working legally, and that he was never fully paid for his work.

Luisa says she rented a room from Alejandro in 2018, in a property she claims he was subletting. According to court documents seen by RTL, she told the Luxembourg magistrates' court (tribunal de paix) that he had thrown her out, keeping her deposit and personal belongings, and sought their return along with damages.

Alejandro never appeared at the hearing, in person or through a representative, despite the summons being delivered to him personally, according to the judgment. The court ruled partially in her favour, ordering him to repay €2,000 of the deposit plus interest and costs. Luisa says she never received the money.

A third man, also Bolivian, told RTL he lost around €10,000 after Alejandro offered to help his girlfriend and her child emigrate to Spain. Contact stopped shortly after the payment, he says, and he later travelled to Luxembourg to try to find Alejandro, without success. RTL obtained a copy of a complaint he filed with Spanish police, which lists the same name and Luxembourgish phone number, as well as one of the companies mentioned by several of the people who contacted us.

The public prosecutor's office confirmed to RTL that an investigation into Sanchez-Lopez case is ongoing, but declined to share further details. None of the claims described in this article seem to have resulted in a criminal conviction.

RTL attempted to contact Alejandro for comment by phone and email. Although he answered the phone, he said he did not speak French well enough to understand our request for comment and asked us to contact him by email instead. RTL subsequently sent two follow-up emails to an address Alejandro confirmed was his. The same email address appears on invoices and in documents obtained by RTL. Neither email received a response.

This article is therefore based on interviews with José Sanchez-Lopez and three other individuals, on documents reviewed by RTL, and on research into Alejandro's dealings between Luxembourg and Spain.

No end in sight

For Sanchez-Lopez, the investigation offers little comfort. He's leaning on his partner and friends to get through it: "Now I live at my girlfriend's apartment. I cannot afford to pay anything because I have a huge mortgage."

The months after September 2025 were physically and mentally straining, he explains: "Because of the stress, I couldn't move with the back. I had a problem in the back, really, for months, without even being able to enter the apartment."

Since then, Sanchez-Lopez has taken work on himself, clearing rubble alone, hiring an electrician to fix what was broken, and a plumber to relay the pipes.

The apartment, meant to be his forever home, remains far from livable, and the €80,000 he'd set aside has shrunk to a fraction of that. "The problem is I'm blocked. I don't have €100,000. I have a huge mortgage. The bank will not give me more money."

Editor's note: At the time of writing, Sanchez-Lopez had received an update from the Public Prosecutor's Office's Organised Crime and Narcotics Department regarding his police complaint, confirming that the investigation remains ongoing.