More than 200 call representatives - who identified themselves as financial investment traders - allegedly coaxed vulnerable victims to put their personal savings into investments like bitcoin, commodities, and foreign currencies. The investigation found that all the advertised investments were fake.
The so-called ‘traders’ spoke several languages including English, German, Russian, Polish, and Hindi.
The suspects are believed to have profited over three million euro (US$3.34 million) per month via their international call centre scam. Latvian police detained 80 individuals in Riga while Lithuanian authorities detained 28 in Vilnius.
In a press release from the Latvian State Police, criminal investigations into the call centres began in February 2021, when the Cybercrime Division suspected that the group was engaged in fraud and money laundering activity.
More than 20 searches were conducted across Latvia, which uncovered items relevant to the investigation, including numerous servers, laptops, cell phones, data carriers, memory cards, documents, notebooks and more.
A video released by the Latvian State Police shows the scale of the illegal operation and a press release from the Lithuanian Police identified more than a dozen victims who were swindled by the call centre, according to current findings from the investigation.
Prosecutors of the Vilnius Regional Prosecutor's Office have discovered that the Lithuanian call centre in Vilnius had been operational since 2019.
Lithuanian authorities also released a video of the Vilnius office raid. Of the 28 individuals detained during the raid, nine have been placed in custody.
Officials froze 25 international bank accounts, financial shares in four other companies, seized three luxury vehicles, four real estate properties valued above 317,000 euro ($352,618), and 95,000 euro ($105,670) in crypto assets.
