A coordinated campaign against a fraudulent online investment platform has been carried out by investigators from the Cybercrime Commissariat of the Braunschweig Central Criminal Inspectorate (ZKI) in four countries, under the aegis of the Göttingen public prosecutor’s office, alongside Eurojust and Europol. At least 33,000 victims were brought to the platform, with an estimated total loss of 89 million euros. In Germany alone, the damage amounts to 22 million euros and around 5,500 victims.
The investigation was aimed at a group of fraudsters in the field of cyber trading. These alleged financial experts, usually from call centres abroad, advise potential victims about supposedly lucrative investment products. The perpetrators communicate in a highly professional manner according to a special script that takes into account all the potential investors’ theoretically possible alternative courses of action and sets out possible reactions. The aim is to get the victims to initially make a small investment of around 200 to 250 euros. The fake online trading platforms pretend that an investment is rapidly developing positively. However, the funds paid in are never used for capital investments. As soon as an investor wants a payout, contact with their supposed customer advisor breaks off or the investment suffers a total loss.
During the raids, law enforcement officers in Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia and Israel searched 13 properties, including five call centres. They executed five European arrest warrants, interviewed numerous witnesses and seized 40 mobile phones, computers, bitcoins, luxury watches, bank cards and documents. Accounts of the accused could be seized, with a total of 159 police forces deployed, 34 of them from Lower Saxony. Europol set up a dedicated operational task force to facilitate information sharing and provide analytical support. The police authority also sent experts to Israel and – via the internet – to the Eurojust coordination centre.
The action was a follow-up to criminal prosecutions against cyber trading in October 2021, when the Bulgarian police raided two call centres in Sofia with around 100 employees. In November, European investigators also announced a strike against the “Milton Group”, which is said to have defrauded hundreds of thousands of investors worldwide via manipulated financial platforms and caused total damage in the billions.
Lower Saxony’s Minister of the Interior, Daniela Behrens (SPD), was pleased with the new success “that our police are technically and operationally able to solve highly complex cybercrime and fraud cases” and arrest perpetrators across state borders. Legal experts consider this phenomenon as commercial and gang fraud, which carries a prison sentence of twelve months to ten years.
