Call centres selling fake crypto taken down in Bulgaria, Serbia and Cyprus

As revealed on Thursday, January 12, law enforcement and judicial authorities from Bulgaria, Cyprus, Germany and Serbia, supported by Europol and Eurojust, teamed up against organised crime groups involved in online investment fraud.

🚨 Call centres selling fake crypto taken down in Bulgaria, Serbia & Cyprus.

🪙 The criminal organisations lured 🇩🇪 victims to invest over EUR 2 million in bogus crypto investment websites.

Details ⤵️https://t.co/sP21aOn8WY pic.twitter.com/jfF7xsuog9

— Europol (@Europol) January 12, 2023

This criminal network, comprising a number of different criminal actors operating through call centres, lured victims into investing large amounts of money into fake cryptocurrency schemes. Europol set up an Operational Task Force to support the cross-border investigation.

The Action day on 11 January 2022 led to:

• 15 arrests, 14 in Serbia and one in Germany;
• 261 individuals were questioned, some of whom are awaiting prosecution (42 in Bulgaria, 2 in Cyprus, 3 in Germany, and 214 in Serbia);
• 22 locations searched (5 in Bulgaria, 2 in Cyprus, 15 in Serbia) including:

o    4 call centres and 11 residences in Serbia,
o    2 residences in Cyprus,
o    2 companies and 3 residences in Bulgaria.

• Seizures include 3 hardware wallets with about USD 1 million in cryptocurrencies on them and about EUR 50 000 in cash, 3 vehicles, electronic equipment and data back-ups, and documents.

At least EUR 2 million in losses 

The suspects used advertisements on social networks to lure victims to websites covertly operated by the criminals, which offered seemingly exceptional investment opportunities in cryptocurrencies. The victims, mainly from Germany, would first invest low, three-digit sums.

Fake price hikes leading to supposedly lucrative profits for investors then persuaded them to make transfers of higher amounts. Currently, it is estimated that the financial damage to German victims is over €2m while other countries such as Switzerland, Australia and Canada also have victims.

The investigation suggested that the number of unreported cases is likely to be much higher. This would mean that the illegal gains generated by the criminal groups, with at least four call centres in eastern Europe, could be in the hundreds of millions of euros.

Europol supported this investigation since June 2022 following an initial request from Germany. During the course of the investigation, Europol facilitated the information exchange, provided analytical support, and coordinated operational activities.

During the action day, Europol deployed two experts to Bulgaria and Serbia to cross-check operational information in real-time against Europol’s databases in order to provide leads to investigators in the field. The experts also provided technical expertise to enable the extraction of information from mobile devices and IT infrastructure.

On the day of the action, Eurojust hosted a coordination centre to facilitate information exchange and support cooperation between involved authorities during the operational activities.

Image credit: rzoze19/Shutterstock.com

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