Eurasia Press & News
“We work here as psychotherapists, you know. You have to know their problems at work, conflicts with their wife, their dreams,” says Branko*. “You talk to them about how long they work, what they plan to do with the money, what their children do and what school they go to. It’s called bonding. My clients contact me within two hours at the latest, ready to invest money.”
Branko (not his real name) earns 900 euros a month plus bonuses selling fake investment opportunities to people from all over the world from one of several illegal call centres operating in Belgrade. And he’s not the only one.
An estimated 1,000 people work in boiler room scam centres in the Serbian capital, although prosecutors unofficially say that the number could be significantly higher, reaching several thousands. Most are young, educated, with good knowledge of foreign languages, but often unaware of the scale and criminality of the system they are a part of.
In recent years the police and prosecutor’s office have launched several actions and filed indictments against the people running these call centres. Some proceedings have gone on for years without a verdict. Yet BIRN has managed to identify dozens of currently active call centres.
The agents
Agents end up working at call centres after finding adverts for “sales support” or “trading agent” roles on Infostud, a leading employment platform in Serbia. The only real job requirement is language proficiency and strong persuasion skills.
Call centre staff have told BIRN they didn’t fully understand what they’re getting into. By the time they do, they have convinced themselves that they are doing nothing wrong. They soon become accustomed to money and privilege, wanting to stay in the role because of the high salaries, the adrenaline rush, and the feelings of power and belonging to a group.
Protection system
According to insiders, some centres have for years been paying an annual “protection fee” of between one and two million euros to people within the Serbian secret services and police force. This, they say, explains why their operations continue without any problems.
A source close to the Serbian prosecution’s investigation into the call centres added that many of the official company owners are merely “mules” – they sign contracts for a monthly fee of about 850 euros, unaware that they are also taking on criminal liability. “Some are just naive – they pay 20,000 euros to become ‘co-owners’ of companies whose business they don’t even understand,” the source said.
However, in some employees’ apartments, police found large sums of cash. In one case, a woman who “doesn’t have 500 dinars [4 euros] in her bank account” was found to have 50,000 euros in a safe.
They work in office buildings organised in a strict hierarchy. At the bottom are what are called “conversion agents” — beginners who call new customers and draw them into the system. Above them are “retention agents”, more experienced manipulators who persuade victims to deposit more money. Next come the team leaders, who monitor performance and maintain contact with the bosses.
Until recently these bosses have almost exclusively been Israelis, who set up the system about ten years ago. Now those positions are also held by Russians, Georgians and Serbians, all of whom see it as a low risk, high-profit venture.
Insiders told BIRN a beginner’s salary starts at around 900 euros a month, while the best retention agents earn between 1,300 and 1,500 euros a month, plus a four percent commission on larger payments. This is higher than the average wage for young people in Serbia. Some agents who are able to trick people out of huge amounts of money, earn tens of thousands of euros per month.
At some call centres, new employees have to undergo polygraph tests to check whether they are telling the truth during job interviews or that they are not undercover police or infiltrators from competitors gaining inside knowledge.
The atmosphere in offices varies between corporate, with strict rules, and Wolf of Wall Street-style hedonism. In some centres, during breaks, music or movies are streamed, including porn videos. Drug use is tolerated, with people smoking marijuana and snorting cocaine in the office. Sometimes cocaine has been given to agents as a bonus. Alcohol is served in glasses with the company logo.
“Every Friday they [the agents] would buy bottles of wine and for the best agent tequila worth 300, 400 euros,” says a former employee now living abroad. “They openly drank and used drugs.” The former employee said managers knew people in sales were using drugs and in some cases even lent agents money to buy them.
Some agents admitted feeling guilty and finding it hatred to sleep at night because they knew they were scamming people out of their life savings. But most suppressed these feelings. “Money moves faster than guilt,” one worker said.
One former employee who eventually realised she was working in a scam call centre says she felt angry at how the scammers were able to rip people off. “I wonder how many kids didn’t get to go on school trips because of them [the scammers]. It’s a completely twisted way of looking at the world.”
The scams
Based on interviews with about a dozen former and current employees, as well as conversations with prosecutors and experts in the field, BIRN has reconstructed how these well-coordinated fraud networks operate and what their internal dynamics look like.
It all starts on social media, with faked video adverts featuring AI generated famous faces such as a politician, athlete or Elon Musk, inviting you to invest money in a “proven” business, most often cryptocurrency, promising a “recipe for wealth”.
One click and you are on a website where they ask you to provide personal information. These ads are never aimed at the domestic audience. They only target people outside the country from which the centre operates. Serbian citizens most often become victims of call centres operating from Russia, Romania and Bulgaria.
Once your name and phone number or email are in the database, you are soon contacted by a “financial adviser” who asks for an initial investment, for example 250 euros. After that, psychological games begin in which retention agents act as “psychotherapists”, ready to talk for hours with their victims. When users turn into what are known as “dedicated investors”, then the real pressure begins: the agents, skillfully trained to convince them to invest ever larger sums of money, call them obsessively for weeks or months.
“I listened to a conversation in which a client said he had to withdraw money [from the investment scheme] because he was repairing the roof. The agent asked him how much it would cost. When the man told him 15,000 euros, the agent replied that he knew craftsmen who would do it for 3,000. He posed as a friend, but in fact he took the last of his money,” said a former employee of the now-defunct Olympus Prime call centre, a company that, according to the Special Prosecutor’s Office for High-Tech Crime investigation, defrauded tens of thousands of people around the world.
Victims are shown fake trading platforms indicating how much profit their investments had made. It is only when they try to withdraw their supposed profits that they realise something is wrong. Suddenly, payouts are delayed and agents become unavailable. At that point, losses can range from a few hundred euros to, in some cases, more than a million euros.
The more money victims invest, the richer the retention agents in the fraudulent call centres become, with bonuses reaching tens of thousands of euros. One manager at Olympus Prime received a bonus of 84,000 euros.
The offices
The surveillance systems are sophisticated. Agents’ conversations with clients are recorded and later evaluated. “Team leaders and Israeli supervisors analyse each call, give ratings and suggestions on how agents can improve their calls with clients,” a source from the Prosecutor’s Office said. In a police operation at the Olympus Prime call centre, hundreds of recordings were found on servers, including conversations in which the agents’ performance was assessed and how much money they had extracted from clients was totalled up.
BIRN has seen the indictment against Olympus Prime, filed more than two years ago but not yet approved by the court. The document states that the company was part of an international network of fraudulent call centres based in Belgrade, linked to Israeli nationals and fraudulent online trading platforms.
The centres are organised according to international areas, with separate desks for German, Scandinavian and English-speaking countries, and special shifts for Canada and Australia, where the working day starts in the afternoon and lasts until late at night. The flags of the countries that bring in the most money are hung on the walls. Each team has its own leader, and at the top of the pyramid is a manager who oversees everything. The prosecutor’s office describes the structure as “a combination of high-tech and organised crime.”
The average call centre in Belgrade earns between 200,000 and two million euros per month, according to an insider who worked in several call centres. The money is laundered through Cyprus, Montenegro, Lithuania and Malta, countries with weak mechanisms for monitoring financial flows and ownership. Only a small part returns to Serbia through cash used to pay bonuses to agents.
Some agents spent their money on luxury, drugs, prostitution, others used it to buy apartments. But also people lost everything after they left the job. “Some went to Dubai. And some went broke – literally. I know two who ended up in psychiatric hospitals, one who committed suicide,” the insider told BIRN, suggesting that some people may have got into debt or felt guilty.
BIRN and Investigate Europe have previously revealed that a group of Belgrade call centres defrauded more than 70,000 people worldwide, with estimated damages of around 250 million euros.
Sworn to silence
“On our first day at work, we were told that we were not allowed to tell anyone about what we were doing. Not our family, not our friends. Also, that we were not allowed to talk about it among ourselves,” said Jelena*, a 25-year-old who until recently worked in one of the call centres in Belgrade’s Vracar neighbourhood.
Agents pick fake phone names to give the impression they are from the victims’ country of origin. To stay in their role, they address each other by those names during breaks.
Jelena found the ad on Infostud, went for an interview, and then to a training session that lasted five days. Out of 20 candidates, only five completed the training. “At first I thought people had given up, but later I realised that they were actually evaluated every day and that those who did not meet the criteria no longer came,” she said.
The first three days were spent learning about the financial market and calling techniques. The third day was crucial. They learned how to react when people on the phone said they were not interested. “If they say, for example, they don’t have money to invest, you should tell them that it doesn’t take much money. We practiced scenarios for every response people might have,” said Jelena.
The candidates were provided with scripts titled ‘Objections’, which had all the possible comments a potential client might make and the arguments they should use in response.
“The next phase involved simulations with the managers, and that was the first time they were subtly told that some of those calls might be scams,” Jelena explained.
“They asked us, hypothetically, whether we’d have a problem if such a call turned out to be a scam. We were told something along the lines of, ‘these things happen in business, it’s all normal.’ From that moment on, all those young people essentially knew what they were getting into. And that’s how the scam became normalised.”
When they started working, part of their training involved listening to a large number of recorded conversations between their colleagues, from which they learned the “trade”.
Jelena described the atmosphere in this call centre as businesslike, but with background music, usually modern Western hits. They spoke exclusively in English when not on the phone. No one was allowed to speak Serbian or any other language.
On her first day on the job, she understood how the scheme worked. Her call centre was divided into a ‘cold desk’ for attracting new clients and a ‘live desk’ for calling back clients. She worked in the cold desk, where their task was to randomly call people from a list of phone numbers they were given
“These people are mostly uninterested, people without money,” said Jelena.
Officially, they were offering victims the possibility to trade in the financial markets and they would act as their financial adviser.
On the live desk, agents called people back who had in some way expressed interest, either by signing up or clicking on a link or an ad. The term “live” comes from the speed – victims are called just a few minutes after leaving their information.
When making calls from the cold desk, they could lie about anything such as where they were calling from, the origin of their number. There were no strict rules. In contrast, the live desk agents operated with well-developed scripts.
The cold desk and the live desk were two completely separate operations. “I’ve never met anyone from the live desk,” said Jelena. “I’ve heard they have different working hours and stay at work longer. For example, if they meet their quota, they don’t have to come to the office for the rest of the month.”
Before moving from the cold desk to the live desk, an employee has to create an entire fake identity: a complete backstory about themselves. For example, if targeting the UK market, they would present themselves as someone who lives there, and have a story about how they arrived, exactly where they live, what their neighbourhood is like, what they do for living, and what interests them in local politics and society. The same principle applied to any country or language group. The identity is invented to appear authentic to the victim they are trying to lure.
Later she found out there was a third area, called the “retention desk”. This was where those who already have clients work, whose victims are convinced they are investing serious money. Here, all the data was collected, documents prepared, and fake “investments” arranged.
The people working with Jelena were mostly young men. There were around 30 of them on the cold desk. “Nothing special happened, there were no motivational speeches or events. They’d just say, ‘Let’s go make deals,’ and that was it,” said Jelena, who resigned a few days after speaking to BIRN.
“Once a manager told us that if we did well, we’d have so much money we wouldn’t know what to do with it, but they’d help us launder it through Bitcoin,” she added.
Work habits and psychology
Agents had to get clients’ birth date, citizenship status, job role, earnings and savings. It was also important to try to get a copy of an ID card or passport.
In Jelena’s call centre, agents were told not to call Germans and Americans because the police in these two countries had been working intensively to uncover fake investment scammers. Surprisingly, if someone said they were disabled or received social assistance, further conversation with the victim was cut off. “But if someone says they have cancer, everyone has to decide for themselves whether to continue.”
Communication in the company took place through an app that automatically deletes messages, and which Jelena had to delete when she resigned.
Jelena’s working hours were from 9.45 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. Being late three times meant getting fired. Breaks were strictly timed — 10 minutes every two hours, plus a 45-minute lunch break. The daily quota was two hours of active calls or 400 calls. Each person had to be called three times before being removed from the list.
Her starting salary was 900 euros, plus bonuses. She said agents received a 100-euro bonus if they had a successful call in the first week and referred someone to the live desk, 100 euros for each additional client, and 200 euros if they got three. The top earners on the cold desk made up to 1,500 euros, depending on how many victims they were able to lure.
Everyone she worked with was from Serbia, from human resources staff to directors. They were told there was no need to worry if the police showed up, because everything was legal and “they had connections with the authorities”.
“If there’s trouble, just don’t say anything and that’s it, just say ‘I don’t know anything’ and everything will be fine,” she told BIRN.
It seems that money trumped ethics.
“I don’t know if my colleagues had ethical dilemmas. We didn’t talk about it among ourselves.”
A former agent who worked at a call centre in Belgrade who lives abroad now said that “no one starts out intending to scam”.
“You come because you need money. You’re in your twenties, you know English, they promise you more than your father has. The first three days you believe it’s all legal,” the former agent said.
“Then you hear a colleague bragging that he took 10,000 euros from a guy in Berlin. And everyone laughs. That’s when you realise where you are, but by then you’re already in.”
The man who spoke out
In an article published by BIRN in 2020, it was revealed that Belgrade was already one of the main European hubs for fraudulent call centres. The article was based on information Aleksandar Ignjatovic, a call centre worker, provided to the German police. Ignjatovic was supposed to be the key witness for the Austrian prosecution in the case against Israeli Gal Barak.
Ignjatovic was found dead in a hotel room in Sofia on February 11, 2020. His death was never fully explained, and colleagues said he had been under significant pressure in the days leading up to his death. His 50-page statement helped uncover a fraud worth at least 200 million euros.
He described the “party” culture in the call centres: loud music, lots of alcohol, drugs and occasional prostitutes; in one company, there was an internal dealer offering cocaine and marijuana with the message, “the most important thing is to work.”
According to Ignjatovic, by mid-2019, around 15 call centres controlled by a group of Israelis were operating in Belgrade. At the same time, at least 300 Israeli citizens were seeking work permits in Serbia at some point, with help from lawyers close to the authorities.
He claimed that all employees were required to watch the movie The Wolf of Wall Street as “job preparation”. There was a formal division of fixed salaries and commissions by nationality – Israeli workers and managers earned significantly more than local employees.
