Police in Ukraine have shut down 94 call centers that existed for one purpose: phoning people and talking them out of their money. The raids took place this week and involved 411 searches across the country, carried out by the National Police with support from prosecutors and from the country's security service, the SBU.
So far 26 people have been formally told they are suspects. Investigators say the offenses fall under the fraud and money laundering articles of Ukraine's Criminal Code, which allow for sentences of up to 12 years in prison and the confiscation of property.
What officers found inside looked less like a criminal hideout than an ordinary sales floor. The seizures included 1,794 workstations set up and ready for use, 1,346 phones, more than 5,200 SIM cards and 3,336 other items of computer hardware. Police also took 90 bank cards, the keys to 20 cryptocurrency wallets and 22 vehicles, along with roughly $2 million and 64,000 euros in cash, a quantity of hryvnia, a kilogram of gold bars and jewelry.
According to the police, the centers were run like businesses. Administrators and operators worked from prepared conversation scripts and lists of likely victims, with dedicated software and with ways of hiding the money and moving it out. Some groups did nothing but collect personal details about potential targets, which they then passed or sold to other operations. Others had staff whose task was to find people with a real interest in investing.
The scripts
The schemes varied from one center to the next, but the police describe a handful of recurring stories.
In the most common one, the caller claims to work for the victim's bank and reports a suspicious transaction. The account will be blocked, the victim is told, unless they act quickly. Acting quickly means reading out card details or a verification code, taking out a loan, or installing a remote access tool on a phone or computer so that the helpful employee can sort things out.
A second group of centers posed as investment brokers. They steered people to fake trading and cryptocurrency platforms and encouraged them to keep depositing. Part of this activity was aimed abroad, mainly at citizens of the European Union. In one of those cases Ukrainian investigators are working with German police on a group that pushed its takings through cryptocurrency exchanges before sending them on to accounts it controlled.
Then there is the recovery scam, which goes after people who have already been defrauded once. The caller offers to help get the lost money back, and the victim ends up losing money a second time.
Police also found operators selling dietary supplements as cures for various illnesses. Nothing in the composition of the products had any medical effect.
What comes next
Beyond the cash and equipment, investigators identified 67 other financial instruments they believe were used in the schemes: 40 bank accounts or cards, 12 cryptocurrency wallets and 15 people suspected of acting as money mules.
The seized computers and phones are now being examined. Police expect that work to show who the victims were and how much they lost, and to produce evidence against the organizers as well as against the people who helped launder the proceeds.
Fraud call centers depend on a steady supply of SIM cards, bank accounts and people willing to make the calls. The count of workstations gives a sense of the scale involved here: almost every one of them was a seat from which someone spent the working day phoning strangers.
