{"id":33781,"date":"2020-03-03T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-03T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ostro.si\/?p=33781"},"modified":"2026-06-05T07:11:55","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T05:11:55","slug":"trail-of-broken-lives-leads-to-kyiv-call-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ostro.si\/en\/stories\/trail-of-broken-lives-leads-to-kyiv-call-center\/","title":{"rendered":"Trail of Broken Lives Leads to Kyiv Call Center"},"content":{"rendered":"
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OCCRP<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

Journalists spent months following up on the extensive evidence provided by this whistleblower: thousands of call logs, customer lists, documentation of money transfers, and strikingly callous internal notes on how to target prospective victims, then keep wringing cash out of them for months.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A staffer inside Milton Group\u2019s call center in Kyiv. Credit: Alexander Mahmoud\/DN<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Luxury cars line the parking lot of the upscale Mandarin Plaza mall in Kyiv, while their well-heeled owners flaunt their wealth in its jewellery and designer clothes stores.<\/p>\n

But hidden on its upper floors, protected by armed guards and under the constant surveillance of security cameras, a very different product is being sold.<\/p>\n

Sitting elbow-to-elbow under fluorescent lights, a multi-lingual army of call center staff hawk get-rich-quick dreams across the world in the form of cryptocurrency and stock investments for a company called Milton Group.<\/p>\n

Now, a cache of documents handed to the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter by a whistleblower from inside the call center, and shared with OCCRP, exposes the inner workings of this type of fraud: an old-fashioned boiler-room scam that leverages the power of social media to operate on a global scale.<\/p>\n

Armed with a list of over 1,000 people targeted by the call center, reporters from 21 countries and dozens of media outlets spoke to more than 180 victims, revealing a trail of ruined lives from Sweden\u2019s Arctic Circle to the Ecuadorian Amazon, passing through small industrial towns in the Balkans and major world cities like London and Sydney.<\/p>\n

The stories were strikingly similar. Many first came into contact with the scam through Facebook ads promising remarkable returns on investments. After entering their contact details to find out more, victims would be deluged with high-pressure sales calls. They would make a small \u201cinvestment\u201d that quickly yielded impressive \u2014 but fake \u2014 profits. But requests to withdraw the full funds were not honored. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A screen shown to a Milton Group victim, mimicking a real investment. The losses and gains were entirely fake. Credit: Alexander Mahmoud\/DN<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Those worst affected were preyed upon by the call center\u2019s \u201cretention\u201d desk, whose job was to conjure up new ways to extract more money, often through brutal psychological pressure. Some were harassed into taking out huge loans, threatened by forged letters from UK financial regulators demanding taxes, or contacted by fake lawyers offering to help get their money back \u2014 for yet another fee. In the most extreme cases, Milton Group\u2019s retention specialists would convince victims to install software on their computers that allowed the scammers to control them remotely, and steal more money in the process. Some lost more than $200,000. <\/p>\n

The victims, fooled by foreign names and addresses, and assurances of sky-high returns, believed they were on the phone with a legitimate investment business based in Western Europe. They had no inkling that the people on the other end of the line were largely young Ukrainians or Middle Eastern and African migrants in Kyiv. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n