Call-centre crypto scammers unmasked as data leak exposes their schemes

Marcel Deschamps was on the edge of despair.

The factory foreman from Alexandria, Ont., a small community between Ottawa and Montreal, had lost his savings in a crypto investment scam. He had reported it to the Ontario Provincial Police, but investigators hit a wall.

Beset by suicidal thoughts, Deschamps clung to the hope that someone could help him recover his funds.

Then, in February 2024, someone presenting themselves as a cryptocurrency expert named Mary Roberts reached Deschamps by phone, told him she had found the scammers who took his $200,000 and assured him she could get it back.

She told Deschamps he was on a watchlist because he'd given money to fraudsters and would need to transfer $3,500 into a crypto wallet to prove he was a legitimate investor. She promised "it's 110 per cent that I'm going to find that money and I'm going to send it to you." 

In reality, "Mary Roberts" was yet another scammer, and had pirated the identity of a real financial adviser.

In fact, as an investigation by Radio-Canada's investigative show Enquête and partner media outlets found, she's part of a fraud empire that has left millions of victims, in Canada and elsewhere, on the brink of financial ruin.

The scammers typically ply their schemes from abroad with impunity, as domestic police investigators struggle even to identify them, let alone bring them to justice.

But thanks to a massive leak of records — which reveals in an unprecedented way the internal workings of the scammers — Radio-Canada and a global team of journalists have been able to track them down.

Last year, journalists at Swedish public broadcaster SVT got a big scoop, when a confidential source leaked them nearly two terabytes of internal records from two phone-scam call centres. One of the call centres is in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, and the other is spread across Israel, Spain, Cyprus, Ukraine and Bulgaria. 

SVT shared the files with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global network of investigative journalists, as well as Radio-Canada and more than 30 other media outlets.

The leaked documents show that the two scam networks have defrauded at least 32,000 victims out of more than $275 million US, with the thieves operating like any well-oiled big business: human resources departments, IT support teams and bespoke customer-relationship management software for tracking victims.

Among the leaked files are audio recordings of more than one million calls to victims and nearly 20,000 video captures of the scammers' computer screens — recordings that were made so the scam networks could keep an eye on their employees and sharpen their skills at ensnaring their marks.

The confidential source who leaked the files said they did it because these kinds of crimes are almost never solved, due to the logistical and jurisdictional hurdles of cross-border investigations.