Organised crime networks are using call centres in Albania to defraud people across Europe, conning them with promises of big profits from scam investments and employing sophisticated social-engineering techniques.
It began in June 2019 with a Google search for ‘investment opportunities’.
The results took Carina Christine Bruenig and her husband, Christoph, to the website of a purported trading platform called Globalix. The couple registered, and within minutes the phone rang in their home in Aschaffenburg, some 40 kilometres east of Frankfurt, Germany.
On the other end of the line was a man who introduced himself as their investment account manager, Dr Adrian Ross; Ross guided Christoph through the verification process and Christoph made an initial deposit of 250 euros. Then he paid in 750 euros, then more, and more over the following months, urged on by Ross, who told him it was the only route to more lucrative trading positions.
Christoph followed the progress of his ‘investments’ on his computer, watching his profits grow on graphs on the Globalix platform; Christoph had dealt in investments before, but had no inkling that the graphs before him were fake, or that Ross was in fact a young Albanian sitting in a call centre in Tirana.
A year later, after a series of failed attempts to withdraw his funds, Christoph realised he had been duped and went to the police.
Prosecutors in Bavaria received dozens of similar complaints between 2019 and 2021 from German citizens who had been defrauded via at least five fake online investment platforms.
They traced the platforms to a criminal organisation operating multiple call centres in Israel, Serbia and Albania. In Tirana, the network ran a telemarketing company under the name ‘Blue Energy Call’.
There were victims in Greece and Britain, too, but in Germany alone at least 105 individuals were scammed out of millions of euros, probably more given that not everyone will have gone to the police.
Despite the best efforts of law enforcement agencies, cybercrime prosecutors in Bavaria say the fraudsters are thriving.
“Fraudulent online investment platforms still build a flourishing market in which not just one or two, but quite a few organised crime groups cause immense damage not only in Germany, but in numerous countries in Europe,” said Nino Goldbeck, Senior Public Prosecutor at the Bavarian Central Office for the Prosecution of Cybercrime.
“In Bavaria, we suffer losses of well over 100 million euros every year, and that’s just the reported cases,” he said in a written reply. In an increasingly interconnected and digital world, investment fraud has become one of the most widespread forms of financial crime.
According to Interpol, between 2022 and 2023, 85 per cent of international arrest requests, so-called ‘red notices’, concerned cases of fraud.
In 2023 alone, Interpol’s Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre supported more than 700 investigations into fraud schemes worth a total of $1.2 billion, or a billion euros. One of the two main types of fraud involved fake investment schemes.
Victims are lured by social media ads, fraudulent websites and apps, and telemarketing operations run from call centres, where operators make unsolicited calls and apply psychological pressure or social-engineering techniques to convince targets to invest in bogus financial schemes, promising high returns.
The widespread use of cryptocurrencies has opened new avenues for these types of fraudsters to operate and launder the illicit earnings.
Goldbeck said that key to the scam are the contact details of interested investors, usually collected through large-scale advertising campaigns run by specialised marketing companies on social media.
“These companies place misleading or manipulated advertisements on social networks like Facebook, on news sites and so on,” he said. A common tool are false celebrity endorsement claims.
And Tirana, with its young, multilingual workforce, has become a hub for such call centres over the past five years.
Police press releases point to regular busts and arrests, but data obtained by BIRN via Freedom of Information requests show only a handful of successful indictments.
Most are handled by Albania’s Special Structure Against Organised Crime and Corruption, SPAK, in cooperation with Eurojust, the EU’s Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, and the bloc’s law enforcement agency, Europol.
SPAK told BIRN that in 2024 it had 11 active investigations into call-centre-based fraud involving organised criminal groups, and between 2021 and 2024 it sent four such criminal cases to trial. Scam call centres often masquerade as legitimate businesses, with operators adopting the language and mannerisms of investment advisers to manipulate their victims.
Located on the second and third floors of the Condor Centre on Kavaja Street in Tirana, Blue Energy Call LLC looks like any other telemarketing company, with long rows of desks from which dozens of operators made calls in foreign languages to clients in other countries.
However, according to German investigators from the Bamberg Prosecutor General’s Office, northern Bavaria, behind the facade was a sophisticated criminal operation that defrauded people across Europe through so-called ‘cyber-trading’ platforms.
In mid-March 2022, SPAK prosecutors, dozens of Albanian police officers, 11 German investigators and a prosecutor from the Bavarian Central Cybercrime Office raided the company’s Tirana offices and an IT firm.
Among 15 people detained were the two ringleaders – Erion Kasmi and Xhulian Xhafa.
Prosecutors described Kasmi as the de facto head of Blue Energy Call and its affiliated IT company Cleartech LLC; Xhafa, they said, managed the computer network and regularly used the application Deepfreeze to destroy evidence.
To secure digital evidence, eight forensic specialists travelled from Germany to Albania. Using a mobile IT-forensic lab, they seized computers, servers and smartphones.