Authorities in Germany claimed to have taken down what was presumably the biggest fraudulent contact centre network in Europe, fielding thousands of scam calls per day, reports RTE.
On April 18, Europol announced in a separate statement, that a multinational police operation comprising agents from Germany, Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Lebanon raided 12 call centres and detained 21 persons.
Serbian officials said that they had also conducted searches.
The sophisticated investigation named Operation Pandora “successfully uncovered what is probably the largest call centre fraud scheme in Europe,” said Thomas Strobl, the interior minister of the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, reports RTE.
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According to Europol, the calls would pretend to be “close relatives, bank employees, customer service agents, or police officers” and would “shock and cheat their victims out of their savings” by using “a variety of manipulation tactics”.
The investigation got underway in December 2023 when a Baden-Wuerttemberg bank employee became suspicious about a customer’s desire to take out a sizable cash withdrawal. After informing the authorities, he prevented the victim from giving the money to the con artists, reports RTE.
Subsequently, authorities connected the scammers’ phone numbers to a massive operation, which prompted a more extensive probe.
Over a hundred German cops were assigned to monitor up to thirty talks at a time while working around the clock and listening in on calls from the contact centre in real time, reports RTE.
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