Celebrated by the dance music press, Alejandro Zamora claimed that his DJ livestreams relieved his depression and inspired a global community of mental health-conscious followers. Was it all just another scam?
Earlier this year, Jose Alejandro Zamora Yrala, who was featured in a number of interviews in dance music media a year ago under the name The White Collar Project, was sentenced to 56 months in prison for a bizarre caper in which he sold tens of thousands of counterfeit aircraft engine parts to major airlines and suppliers.
The scope of the fraud is breathtaking: counterfeit parts traced to Zamora’s home-based business were found in jet engines in the fleets of at least seven major airlines, including United, Delta and American. Discovery of the fraud lead to flights being grounded around the world.
Zamora, who was born in Venezuela, also previously DJ’d in London under the moniker “Santa Militia.”
As director of a company called AOG Technics, Zamora “sold parts to airlines and suppliers across the globe as part of a £39.3 million ($52 million) fraud conducted from his home office in Surrey,” according to the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office. Most of the parts Zamora sold were for use in servicing the CFM56 engine, “the world’s most widely used commercial aircraft engine,” the statement claims. As much as 90% of his company’s revenue over a four year period starting in 2019 came from selling counterfeit airline parts, and Zamora’s fraud “exposed a major vulnerability in the global aerospace supply chain,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
Zamora pled guilty to “fraudulent trading” in the UK in December 2025, two years after he was charged. The Southwark Crown Court sentenced Zamora to 4 years and 8 months in prison in February 2026.
Yet while he was facing charges, Zamora launched a new career as a DJ and as sole member of the “The White Collar Project.” Zamora deployed publicists to pitch dance music media for stories about his wildly popular DJ channel on YouTube, where he spun vinyl and played underground techno, house and other genres. Many in the media complied, leading to nearly a dozen stories about Zamora’s breakthrough. His livestreamed sets, Zamora claimed, freed him from the bonds of depression; in nearly every interview he emphasized the therapeutic effects of his DJ streams for himself and the supposedly thousands that followed him.
“I’ll keep building the community side [of The White Collar Project] around mental health,” he told one site, “because this project started as a lifeline, and that will always stay at its core.”
That community, which one dance music site estimated as “over 160,000 subscribers” in an interview with Zamora last August, was mostly fake.
After being pitched on Zamora’s breakthrough success, 5 Mag drew attention to anomalies on Zamora’s YouTube and other social media pages that were suggestive of fraud. DJ sets with tens of thousands of views were sandwiched between episodes that couldn’t break a few hundred. Few had any comments, and most of the comments that existed were the kind of generic platitudes that are commonly posted by bots. Zamora’s now-deleted Instagram account showed similar signs of fake engagement.
Unknown to 5 Mag at the time, the criminal charges filed by the UK government included allegations that Zamora had “invented fake employees, with customers receiving emails and documents signed by a range of fabricated sales managers and quality managers, as part of creating an illusion of a legitimate business,” according to UK Serious Fraud Office. Police reviewing his phone discovered search engine inquiries such as “when you edit a pdf ca[n] you hide that it has been changed.”
Nearly every detail we were pitched about Zamora’s DJ career collapsed under scrutiny. Much of it was just bizarre. His White Collar Project website — “Be Iconic. Be White Collar” was the emphatic but mysterious tagline — promoted his streaming DJ career but was also filled with weird SEO posts and a shop with designer t-shirts Zamora was selling for $800. (Zamora’s customers, if he had any, will probably want to double-check their merchandises’ authenticity.)
Unaware of the criminal accusations of impersonation against him, 5 Mag approached one of Zamora’s publicists with doubts about the story they pitched to us last August.
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“None of this looks real,” we wrote, “and it seems like he didn’t spend any time even trying to make them look real. Unlike some people who do this, it appears his actual ‘movement’ is zero. I don’t know if there’s a single person viewing any of this stuff because there’s almost no evidence of any.”
Then there was the part about him being charged with incredibly serious fraud. None of it was mystery: it had been covered extensively in the media at the time because of the sheer audacity of it. In our message to his publicist, we included a link to a Bloomberg story outlining the fraud charges brought by the UK government against Zamora, which was not revealed in the PR pitch but was easily found by Googling his name. It was clearly the same person — Bloomberg even had a photo of him looking less than iconic (but very white collar) walking out of court. It’s the same guy, and it predates nearly all of this coverage about the holistic powers of his DJ sets.
Zamora’s fraud “risked public safety on a global scale in a way that defies belief.”
The publicist said they would question Zamora about the issue. Later, after his sentencing, they told us that under questioning Zamora insisted he was innocent of the charges and repeated that music had become a comfort at a troubled time.
Clearly it was all lies, the publicist says now, “as he was not only found guilty, but also pleaded guilty to fraud.” Representing Zamora was an error, they said, “and something I regret.”
None of the dance music media sites that interviewed Zamora about his depression-curing DJ streams during his publicity surge last summer — his own website lists a half dozen that published interviews with him — mentioned that he was under indictment, much less the nature of the charges against him. Authorities claimed counterfeit parts could have lead to catastrophic engine failure — literally, planes falling out of the sky. Zamora’s scheme “risked public safety on a global scale in a way that defies belief,” the Serious Fraud Office’s Director of Operations Emma Luxton said in a statement.
“Your channel seems to have blown up without any big marketing push. Do you see that as luck, timing, or just people craving something more human from DJ culture?”
I have to admit now that I regret 5 Mag wasn’t one of the outlets that covered Zamora’s DJ rejuvenation (we were pressed for time to do a full investigation but tried to pass information we uncovered on to someone that would). Interviewing a guy running a fraudulent scheme like this — and then applying the same fraudulent techniques to try to ride to fame in the DJ world — could be fascinating. Even the cheek of dubbing his scheme “The White Collar Project” — suggestive as it is of “white collar crime” — begged even the most tentative interviewer to question him about the nature of his supposed “legal and business problems.”
Instead, sites that accepted the pitch during Zamora’s publicity binge asked him questions such as:
Mental health sits at the root of your story. How has The White Collar Project community shaped your recovery, and vice versa?
Your channel seems to have blown up without any big marketing push. Do you see that as luck, timing, or just people craving something more human from DJ culture?
The White Collar Project was born from a battle with depression. How did returning to vinyl mixing help you reconnect with yourself?
As a result of Zamora’s original fraud, “planes in the UK and across the world were grounded,” the Serious Fraud Office claims, “with an estimated loss of over £39.3 million ($52 million) for airlines including American Airlines and Ethiopian Airlines as well as various manufacturers.” Counterfeit engine parts sourced from Zamora were identified on planes operated by Delta, United, Southwest, Virgin Australian and more, according to the Wall Street Journal. American Airlines alone found counterfeit parts on 28 aircraft engines within their fleet.
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At the time of his press blitz, Zamora’s fraud charges had been reported by multiple news outlets and were easily accessible by a Google search of his name, which was how we found out about them. His arrest was also widely publicized, and the issues the case raised regarding supply chains made the news — much more than his DJ career ever had, at least before the summer of 2025. Writers and editors in the dance music press didn’t just swallow a line — they didn’t bother to check who was baiting it.
(Strangely, almost no dance music media sites that reported on Zamora’s sentencing have connected him to the “White Collar Project” or its dubious PR campaign. Neither Resident Advisor nor Mixmag mentioned it at all, referring instead to his long-abandoned “Santa Militia” DJ name, which Zamora hasn’t used in at least seven years. Mixmag claimed he was “not recently active as a DJ,” yet Zamora’s last DJ set for the “White Collar Project” was posted on December 23 2025, shortly before he was sentenced. His DJ-related scheme, openly connected to his real name, continued until he plead guilty for his engine parts-related scheme. Again, “nobody bothered to Google the now-convicted con-man” is the only explanation.)
Zamora was, above all, a hustler. What was his angle in hustling dance music sites by pretending to be some kind of troubled, sensitive playboy with a huge online following? In the courts, he was fucked — he had to know that a jail sentence was forthcoming. Why try to astroturf a career that you’d be imprisoned before you could benefit from in any meaningful way?
Zamora’s publicist said they can’t explain what Zamora hoped to gain from gaming the press. Maybe it was intended to be a distraction. Maybe it was an SEO play, to get his name associated with something other than the word “fraud.” Or maybe he was just a sociopath who couldn’t tell the truth about anything, and when one fraud was uncovered, he instinctively turned his old DJ hobby into another one.
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