Scam Empire takes readers inside the insidious cyberfraud industry, which swindles the public out of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. This ambitious collaborative investigation by OCCRP, Swedish Television (SVT), and 30 other media partners from multiple countries, was based on an unprecedented leak of 1.9 terabytes of leaked data that enabled journalists to enter the scammers’ world and even to watch them at work.
Reporters exposed two groups of call centers, based in Israel, Eastern Europe, and the country of Georgia, whose employees have convinced some 32,000 people across the world to make “investments” totaling at least $275 million since 2021.
Using fake celebrity endorsements, false financial dashboards, and brutal psychological manipulation, the scammers convinced victims to pay into sham investment platforms, monitoring their computer activity and at times verbally abusing them during calls. Ruthless call center agents made millions while destroying lives around the world: a surgeon, a retired police office, and victims who said they considered suicide. The vast majority are left without justice.
“Scam call centers have been a scourge for years and the people who work there act with near-impunity because it is so easy for them to hide their actions,” said OCCRP Deputy Editor in Chief Julia Wallace. “By finally giving the public a look inside the heart of these operations, we hope Scam Empire will help return some measure of power back to the victims of these heartless fraudsters.”
Over 20,000 hours of audio recordings were transcribed, translated, and analyzed by the investigative team using artificial intelligence and custom-built workflows. OCCRP engineers designed a system to process the multilingual audio safely and at scale, using tools on encrypted servers to preserve victim privacy.
The project team interviewed many of the victims including one in Canada who had been verbally abused by a scammer and taunted that he would never find her. But we did. By taking clues from the leak along with a painstaking OSINT investigation, OCCRP journalists were able to identify her. The victim confronts her in a dramatic call which features in the documentary that accompanies the project.OCCRP’s visual storytelling made the scam machinery accessible to the public. Interactive timelines, internal training materials, scam scripts, and fake websites revealed the step-by-step mechanics of financial manipulation. A Voices of the Victims video series gave survivors a platform to speak directly to a global audience, in the hope that they could prevent others from falling for such scams and remove the stigma around it. This was a truly global investigation — coordinated across time zones, languages, and formats. Partners confronted call center operators in person, co-published multimedia stories, and shared findings for months.
Scam Empire sparked an official investigation and asset freezes in Georgia and informed the public of this massive fraud. But its greatest achievement may be this: turning a huge trove of data into accountability — and giving voice to people who thought they had none.
