cURL error 77 on Windows 10 XAMPP

im trying to upload a text file to my S3 bucket. Every time i try i get this error

RequestException in CurlFactory.php line 187:
cURL error 77: error setting certificate verify locations:
CAfile: ‪pathToMy.pem 
CApath: none (see http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-errors.html)

i have my .ini set up like this

curl.cainfo=‪"D:\LocalHost\php\ext\cacert.pem"

And finally in my controller i have something like this

        $S3 = \Storage::disk('s3');
        $S3->put('test.txt', 'First file upload', 'public');

any help would be greatly appreciated :)