European police busts Ukraine scam call centers

Law enforcement agencies from several European countries have arrested twelve persons suspected of being involved in scamming victims across Europe, Eurojust announced today.

“The fraudsters used various scams, such as posing as police officers to withdraw money using their victims’ cards and details, or pretending that their victims’ bank accounts had been hacked,” the EU Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation explained.

“They convinced their victims to transfer large sums of money from their ‘compromised’ bank accounts to ‘safe’ bank accounts controlled by the network. They also lured victims into downloading remote access software and entering their banking details, enabling the criminal group to access and control the victims’ bank accounts.”

The criminal organization behind these scams recruited persons from the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania and other countries, and brought them to their call centres in Dnipro, Ivano-Frankivsk and Kyiv (Ukraine).

Law enforcement at one of the scam call centers (Source: Eurojust)

“Members of the criminal group had different roles in the organisation, ranging from making calls and forging official certificates from the police and banks to collecting cash from their victims. Investigations showed that around 100 people from different European countries worked in the call centres,” Eurojust noted.

The scammers who worked with the victims directly would get up to 7% of the money they managed to appropriate, and were promised a car or an apartment in Kyiv if they tricked victims into parting with sums over 100,000 euros. (They apparently never succeeded at the latter.)

Nevertheless, they did manage to steal over 10 million euros from over 400 known victims.

A day of action

With the support of Eurojust, law enforcement authorities from Ukraine, Czech Republic, Latvia and Lithuania executed 72 searches in three cities in Ukraine on December 9, 2025.

They searched offices, residences and vehicles, and seized:

• Forged police officers and bank employee IDs
• Computers, laptops, hard drives and mobile phones
• A polygraph machine
• Cash
• 21 vehicles
• Various weapons and ammunition

Though the various police forces identified 45 suspects, only twelve were arrested during the raids.