Using high-pressure 24-hour call centers based in the Balkans, an international cryptocurrency network has scammed more than 200,000 victims in Europe, most of them in Germany, Italy and Spain. The global rip-off has now been exposed by a coordinated investigation involving police from seven countries. Spanish police intercepted three million emails that enabled investigators to identify and connect more than 470 websites supported by call centers, technology platforms and businesses. From their analysis of all the emails ending with the top-level domain for Spain (.es), police estimate that there may be at least 17,000 potential victims in that country alone. This number doesn’t include people with emails ending in .com who may have been swindled by a global network that is constantly shapeshifting and reinventing itself. According to police sources, the criminals have raked in $2.5 billion (€2.4 billion) from hundreds of thousands of victims around the world.
Eurojust (European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation) is coordinating the unprecedented investigation with seven European nations that recently conducted simultaneous raids on call centers in Albania, Georgia, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and Ukraine.
“These organizations first sprang up in Israel and Eastern Europe. Little by little, they started connecting with each other and grew bigger,” said Mauro Jordan, an attorney who represents about 20 people in the legal case that triggered the…
