Scam call centers in Ukraine ran for years with police protection

Fraudulent call centers in Ukraine stayed in business by paying off the people meant to shut them down. Security Service of Ukraine chief Oleksandr Poklad fired two senior officials this week after anti-corruption investigators found a network that bribed law enforcement to leave the centers alone, as reported by Recorded Future News. If you have been targeted by a call center scam reaching from abroad, report it through your own country's fraud reporting service rather than assuming local enforcement already knows.

What to do

• Report any suspicious call or call center scam to your own country's fraud reporting service, not just the police who answered the call.
• Check a caller's identity using a number or website you already know is genuine, never one the caller gives you.
• Stop and do not reply if a call or message pressures you to act immediately.

The investigation, called Operation Carthage, found at least twelve people in the network, including senior officials from the SBU itself, the Prosecutor General's Office and the National Police, alongside people linked to organized crime. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office said the group took bribes specifically to let fraudulent call centers run without interference. The scam did not succeed because a victim missed a warning sign. It succeeded because the people whose job was to close it down were paid to look away.

The same network is accused of drug trafficking, counterfeit cigarette production, currency forgery, kidnappings and assaults. NABU said the organization 'used corrupt connections within law enforcement agencies to protect its illegal activities and generate illicit profits'. During one court-authorized search, a senior SBU official reportedly threatened to use a firearm and blocked investigators from entering.

This follows an earlier case disclosed in September involving the office of then-Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, where officials allegedly collected payments from fraudulent call centers since mid-2025 to keep police and prosecutors from interfering. Those centers targeted victims in Ukraine and abroad. Kravchenko denied involvement and resigned, then left Ukraine on what he described as official business.

Ukraine's parliament has since passed legislation creating specific criminal penalties for setting up, running or working at a fraudulent call center, and for recruiting people into one. That law does not reach the officials accused of protecting these operations; it targets the people inside them. For anyone who has received a call from one of these centers, protection built around the operations was designed to stop complaints from leading to a response.

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