Introduction

People across the globe are losing hundreds of billions to scam call centres, which operate more like savvy tech startups than traditional criminal enterprises. These scam centres don’t just rely on luck—they outsource large chunks of their work, harness data-driven strategies, and use AI to ramp up their operations on an industrial scale. Essentially, on the surface they run with the efficiency and polish of a legitimate telemarketing business, making them incredibly tough to shut down. Consequently, the financial losses and emotional trauma inflicted on victims continue to mount.

What do scam call centres look like?

Scam call centres are organised groups or businesses that make fraudulent phone calls to trick people into carrying out specific activities with the aim of getting access to their money or personal data. Unlike random spam calls, these centres operate on a large scale with many employees employing sophisticated scripts and techniques that are highly convincing.

Employees of these call centres might pose as seemingly legitimate actors offering an opportunity too enticing or realistic to pass up. For example:

• Government officials claiming you owe taxes;
• Bank representatives warning of suspicious activity on an account;
• Tech support agents offering to fix fake computer problems;
• Lottery or prize organisers with fake winnings;
• A company offering a refund for a purchased product.

Their goal is simple—to deceive victims into sending money, sharing personal information, or downloading malicious software. What makes them especially dangerous is the professional way in which they operate, using data analytics and AI to target victims more effectively. They are also often very adaptable, shifting tactics as old techniques or methodologies are exposed.

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The current scale of scam call centres

“Scam Empire”—a recent investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Swedish Television (SVT), and 30 other media partners—revealed the operations of two of these global scam centres. The investigation, based on 1.9 terabytes of leaked data and 20,000 hours of recorded calls, uncovered a fraud network that successfully convinced around 32,000 victims to “invest,” extracting at least $275 million.

The investigation details how these fraud operations involved sleek offices and multilingual agents selling fake investment opportunities, such as fake crypto investments. One of the scam operations was orchestrated by a Georgia-based company called A.K. Group, a telemarketing firm on paper, owned by two seemingly ordinary successful entrepreneurs, Meri Shotadze and Akaki Kevkhishvili. Under a facade of a legitimate business, the company recruited ambitious young individuals to execute its scams, promising high pay and exposure to lavish lifestyles. These employees worked to convince victims into investing thousands into fake crypto platforms, such as one platform called “Golden Currencies.” Investment fraud operations like these are among the most severe forms of scams worldwide.

In the UK, consumers lost a total of £11.4 billion to scams in 2024, with over half of consumers surveyed saying they were exposed to an investment scam of some sort. Another study in the UK found that victims of call-related frauds received roughly four scam calls per month, equating to about 447 minutes annually of unwanted calls.

Investment fraud is also a growing threat in the Middle East, with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) reporting it as the third most common fraud type in the region. In the UAE, for example, 56% of the UAE population reported receiving a scam attempt at least once per month in 2024, with phone calls and texts common mediums for these scams. One study by the cyber-security company Group-IB also highlighted the key role of social media in the proliferation of these scams, with the MENA region seeing the highest proportion of scams shared on social media. Common red flags of investment fraud include high-pressure sales tactics, promises of guaranteed or unusually high returns, unsolicited contact, and requests for secrecy or ‘confidential’ dealings.

Moreover, while the scale of these fraud operations continues to grow rapidly, the consequences of orchestrating them remain, for the most part, alarmingly limited.

According to the OCCRP, a key motivation behind its Scam Empire investigation was the largely open way in which these fraud operations function, including establishing themselves in countries where authorities turn a blind eye. Crimes frequently go unpunished, and when perpetrators are exposed, they are often able to relocate and resume operations with minimal disruption. Even in the UK, which takes fraud very seriously, just one in 1,000 fraud cases are solved, due to a range of issues, such as the cross-border nature of many investigations and a lack of adequate resources for law enforcement.

The service providers enabling these networks

What’s even more alarming about these scam call centres is the sophisticated ecosystem that supports them, both wittingly and-perhaps more concerningly-unwittingly. Behind the scenes lies a network of professional intermediaries and technology providers that makes these operations not only effective but incredibly difficult to trace.  

The OCCRP investigation revealed that scam call centres relied on a variety of third-party services—ranging from lead generation platforms and marketing automation tools to payment processors—at every stage of their fraudulent operations. These specialised “shadow” networks allowed the scammers to operate with less direct exposure, fragmenting responsibilities across multiple layers and making investigations significantly harder for law enforcement to untangle.

The scam call centres in question first employed external marketers to post online phishing ads, such as fake investment opportunities promising big returns. The goal of these ads was to extract the contact information of potential victims, funnelling the data from people who clicked and interacted with them directly to the call centres. These marketers often themselves hid behind shell companies, encrypted chats, and even fake employee profiles. One marketing provider implicated in the OCCRP investigation was MGA Team, which earned over $500,000 for marketing services provided to one of the scam call centres. Payouts were most often in cryptocurrencies. According to LinkedIn, the company is headquartered in Moscow and handles sponsor and other marketing events in cities such as Dubai and Bangkok.The various scam centres also used software to streamline their scams, for instance employing customer relationship management (CRM)  software to store contact details and information about each potential victim, such as notes on the proposed investment opportunity and how engaged the victim seemed to be. The centres also paid for “voice-over-IP” (VoIP) services that allowed them to make international calls over the internet, as well as admin software to help with things such as payroll. It is unclear how many of these software and service providers knew what was going on behind the scenes, with the fraudsters reportedly often paying for services through front companies.

The illicit finance side of the equation

Once scams are carried out successfully, fraudsters need to figure out how to launder the proceeds - what to do with the money in order to hide it from law enforcement and, eventually, use it. This is where payment service providers and banks come into play. In the case of the OCCRP investigation, the scammers would often dupe victims into setting up new bank accounts in their own names; allegedly, the scammers maintained a preferred list of banks they considered easier to bypass in terms of

anti-fraud protections. Once funds were in these bank accounts, scammers were faced with the issue of getting the funds as far away from a paper trail as possible. The scammers, according to OCCRP, would then move the money through other bank accounts, often linked to shell companies, using an ecosystem of unregulated payment services to do so, including:

• Underground payment providers
  Scammers relied on hundreds of unregulated payment providers—often not formally registered or owning any real business licenses. These firms matched victims’ nationality and payment amount to suggest suitable bank accounts and issued fake invoices (e.g. for theatre tickets) to justify transfers. They charged high fees—often 10–17% per transaction.
• Proxy-owned shell companies
  ‍Money was routed through shell companies registered in multiple jurisdictions, frequently owned by unrelated or fake intermediaries. These entities held bank accounts at reputable institutions (like Revolut, BBVA and Santander) to receive the funds, helping obscure ultimate beneficiaries and muddy the trail.

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What can be done?

As scam call centres increasingly mimic the structure and veneer of real companies, they often exploit the same infrastructure used by legitimate firms, such as digital advertising platforms, CRM tools, international payment systems, and the world’s leading banks.

This raises a troubling issue: many legitimate service providers may be inadvertently enabling fraud. A CRM vendor could have a client storing victim data under the guise of “lead management.” A payment processor may be at risk of processing transactions tied to fraudulent schemes if robust onboarding and monitoring controls are not in place. The reputational and legal consequences for businesses caught up in these operations—wittingly or not—can be severe.

Increasingly, regulators and law enforcement are scrutinising the “enablers” of financial crime, not just the perpetrators. This includes financial institutions, fintechs, and service vendors that fail to carry out proper due diligence, risk assessments, or suspicious activity monitoring. In many cases, bad actors use front companies and false credentials to gain access to services, and once onboarded, they can blend in with the legitimate customer base. Without clear red flags or network mapping, they can operate for months—sometimes years—before being detected.

Banks and payment providers also face a unique set of challenges, with authorised push payment (APP) fraud becoming one of the most pressing financial crime issues in countries such as the UK today. APP fraud is often directly linked to these scam call centres, with victims duped into willingly transferring money to fraudsters. Indeed, in 2024, total losses to APP scams in the UK reached approximately £450 million.For years, banks and payment providers bore limited liability for these losses. That changed significantly with the mandatory reimbursement scheme introduced by the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) in 2024—now banks and other payment providers in the UK are obligated to reimburse victims, which has significant financial implications for these financial institutions.

Conclusion

In a world where financial crime has become more automated, networked, and professionalised, traditional compliance approaches are no longer enough. Advanced due diligence tools, risk-based solutions, and bespoke investigations that help uncover hidden linkages between front companies, shell entities, and bad actors can help protect businesses from fraud exposure.

Whether you’re in banking, tech, or corporate services, you must take proactive steps to ensure your business doesn’t become a silent enabler of organised fraud.