It hasn’t exactly gone to plan for Jose Cifuentes ever since he made a move to Rangers last summer.
Coming off the back of the Qatar World Cup with Ecuador, the LAFC midfielder was eyeing his next big move in football and Rangers came calling.
But the switch to Europe didn’t work out the way Jose Cifuentes or the Ibrox club wanted and only six months later was the Ecuadorean heading back to South America.
Now out on loan at Brazilian side Cruzeiro, things haven’t been all rosy in Belo Horizonte either.
Struggling for game time in Brazil and having failed to get any minutes with Ecuador at the Copa America, Jose’s career is in real risk of regressing.
But as Cifuentes looks to win a permanent exit from Rangers, it’s not just on the football pitch that things are going wrong.
Cifuentes victim of ‘WhatsApp scam’
Whilst few would try and impersonate Jose Cifuentes on the park at the moment, someone has been trying to imitate the Rangers midfielder off it.
As reported by Brazilian outlet Zeiro, Cifuentes has fallen victim to a ‘WhatsApp scam’ where someone is using his profile to try and fleece unsuspecting punters from their hard-earned Reals.
And all while the midfielder was sitting on the bench for Cruzeiro!
The report claims that Cifuentes was ‘the victim of a scam on WhatsApp’ as he sat watching his teammates defeat Gremio 2-0 last Wednesday (10/07).
It’s claimed that the fraudster ‘pretended to be the player to try to scam people on social media’.
Jose Cifuentes even directly responded to the scam with a message which was posted on social media and quoted by the Zeiro report.
Sharing an image of the scam, Cifuentes said: “Guys, be very careful with this number, as he is impersonating me.”
Rangers midfielder’s future uncertain
It’s not exactly been Jose Cifuentes’s year or a number of reasons.
The midfielder arrived at Rangers with big expectations but failed to live up to them in his brief stint in Glasgow.
Contracted to the Gers until 2027, Rangers paid £1m to sign Cifuentes from LAFC and Cifu is only on loan at Cruzeiro until December.
Yet to make a league start in Brazil, there are growing doubts that Cruzeiro will take up the loan option to purchase the player come the winter.
It means Jose could be returning to Rangers in the bitter cold of January and we’re not convinced that’s an arrangement that suits any party.
