The profits they make without risking anything are enormous
This is a difficult article to excerpt, mainly because it follows the story of one woman and, in doing so, opens up a vast network of professionally-run scam businesses. It’s well worth a read to understand what’s going on in the world, and how much of a whole economy exists swindling people out of money.
Much of this is based on social engineering, as banks and other financial institutions have put in place technical counter-measures. But the landscape is always shifting, and it’s lucrative business when it’s possible to ‘earn’ $20,000/month for working in a well-lit, efficiently-run office.
For crime groups looking to turn a profit, operating a call center can be more lucrative than trafficking drugs, since the margins are higher and the risks of being caught much lower, according to an investigator from Spain’s Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalonian police, who specializes in investment fraud networks.
[…]
Divided up into different language “desks,” the call center agents use fake names that match the country they are tasked with calling — in the Georgian call center, agents calling Spain had names like “Esteban Fernandez,” while the Russian desk was led by “Kseniya Koen” and the English desk employed “Mary Roberts.”
[…]
“The profits they make without risking anything are enormous,” said the investigator, who was not authorized to speak on the record about his work.
[…]
“Pure phishing frauds, where you can steal a person’s credentials … have been reduced by technical measures,” said Sakari Tuominen, Detective Superintendent of the country’s National Cyber-enabled Crimes Unit. “But then there’s this crime of fraud through social engineering, where a person first builds a trusting relationship … and of course, no technical tools or inhibitions help [in that case].”
Spanish lawyer Mauro Jordan de la Peña said that in his own country, there is a lack of urgency among the police and judiciary to pursue the cases of online investment scam victims, because it is not an issue that triggers as much social alarm as other crimes.
“In Spanish society there’s a sense that, hey, if you are scammed because you wanted to earn a lot of money, then that’s on you,” Jordan said in an interview with OCCRP.
Source: OCCRP
Image: James O’Brien/OCCRP