Illustration: Jurgena Tahiri/BIRN Confidence Tricks: Tirana’s Place in an International ‘Investment’ ScamKlodiana LalaTiranaBIRNApril 14, 202306:26 Klodiana LalaTiranaBIRNApril 14, 202306:26Fake ‘call centres’ across Albania were part of a lucrative stock market investment scam operating across Europe; the suspects include an Albanian man with significant political connections.
On November 14, 2018, a woman called Merce Puig Ribot walked into a police station in the small town of Puigcerda in Catalonia, Spain, to complain that she had been defrauded of more than half a million euros by a company masquerading as a stock market investment intermediary.
More than three years later, in April 2022, Ribot visited the police station again, this time to tell investigators that she had lost another 291,000 euros after being contacted by someone claiming to represent a legal services company that could help recoup her original losses.
The ‘companies’, however, were one and the same. “Both were part of the same fraudulent scheme carried out by the same organisation,” prosecutors wrote in an investigation report on the case obtained by BIRN.
Using IP geolocation, Spanish prosecutors tracked the original company that contacted Ribot – Universe Markets – to call centres in Albania, Ukraine and Serbia, and uncovered a dozen similar platforms created by a single international crime network known as ‘Milton Group’.
The group is alleged to have used call centres in Albania, Bulgaria, Georgia, North Macedonia and Ukraine to almost a quarter of a million people since 2018, raking in roughly 50 million euros per quarter, according to the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, Eurojust.
In November last year, authorities raided six of the call centres in Albania and arrested four people. One man wanted by the Spanish police, however, was not among them – Armant Josifi, a former adviser to current Albanian Foreign Minister Olta Xhacka and business partner of Olsi Rama, the brother of Prime Minister Edi Rama.
The call centres that were raided are owned by three companies connected to Josifi, who is now the target of an international arrest warrant for alleged computer fraud. Josifi could not be reached for comment; Olsi Rama did not respond to a request for comment; and Xhacka referred BIRN to the defence ministry, which she was in charge of when Josifi was a ministerial adviser.
The ministry confirmed Josifi’s role between December 2018 and May 2020.
Confidence tricks
‘Milton Group’ is a transnational criminal organisation dealing in cybernetic crime, fraud and money laundering in Europe since at least 2016.
Via call centres in Albania and other Eastern European countries, victims were tricked into believing they could make large returns on small investments on the stock market, and fast. Using social engineering techniques, the group’s ‘operators’ tricked their victims into investing more and more after winning their trust.
One former operator in Tirana, speaking on condition of anonymity, told BIRN how it worked.
The call centre he worked in was divided into three departments: ‘brokers’, who called numbers at random to find potential investors; ‘apertures’, who opened the account for the first investment; and ‘account managers’ who acted as financial consultants and would urge ‘clients’ to invest more.
Using only fake names, operators placed calls in several European countries but were explicitly banned from taking diaspora Albanians as clients, the operator said.
One technique they used was to exploit widespread public distrust of banks and financial institutions.
“I told them that with the service offered by us, the customer has full control over his money and profits could be withdrawn within a month, or within a day, whatever he chooses,” the former employee told BIRN.
In his call centre alone, there were hundreds of employees. Similar centres operated across the country, in places such as Durres, Vlora, Elbasan and Shkodra. Clients, he said, would be promised a 100 per cent return on their investment, only to lose it all, and more.
Political connections
Armant Josifi. Photo: Facebook
The investigation in Albania, carried out at the request of Spanish authorities, uncovered 10 companies connected with 24 fraudulent platforms in Albania alone.
According to documents of the Special Prosecution against Organised Crime and Corruption, SPAK, 33 year-old Josifi controlled three of the 10 companies.
Besides a stint as an adviser to the former defence minister, in 2014 Josifi co-founded a company called Pegasus Communications Shpk with Olsi Rama, brother of the prime minister, and businessman Endri Meksi. Josifi sold his stake in the firm in 2018.
According to investigation documents seen by BIRN, investigators sifted through some three million emails in order to connect the fraudsters to the Milton Group. They identified 235,942 potential victims in several countries, a third them in Germany.
The former operator in Tirana said he and his colleagues knew very well what they were doing.
“Personally, I heard many cases of customers who had lost their savings, who ended up divorced, their families torn to pieces,” he said. “These were the moments when I thought about quitting. I didn’t want to do that work any longer.”
Source link: balkaninsight.com
