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Greetings From Amsterdam,
This week we continue to dig into the Scam Empire investigation, looking at how the call centers caught their victims — often via ads that featured fake celebrity endorsements.
The Scam Empire project brought together over 30 media partners to expose two scam center operations that have bilked at least 32,000 people out of $275 million since early 2021.
The reporting is already having an impact: Georgian prosecutors announced an investigation into one of the scam operations, which was run out of the country’s capital Tbilisi, and then froze assets of key agents and managers. Meanwhile, some of the Georgia-based scammers who worked there have rushed to delete their social media profiles, which featured them living a life of luxury — and helped reporters identify them.
Reporters spent almost six months parsing through 1.9 terabytes of leaked data from the call centers that was obtained by Swedish Television (SVT) and shared with OCCRP. This week, we’ll hear from OCCRP’s Malina McLennan, the lead data journalist on the project, about how her team tackled this enormous volume of information.
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More on our latest investigation
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Celebrity Deepfakes And Data Brokers: How Scammers Ensnare Their Victims
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The first step in running a large-scale investment scam is catching your victims. This crucial work, we found, was outsourced to affiliate marketing firms.
The leaked files revealed hundreds of marketers who were paid by the scam operations to post ads for phony get-rich-quick schemes online. After collecting the contact information of those who clicked on the ads, the marketers supplied this data to the call centers, and were paid for every individual that went on to make an initial deposit.
While the marketers’ identities were often obscured behind brand names, offshore companies, and even fake employee profiles, reporters were able to connect several victims, some of whom lost their life savings, to the marketers who had supplied their details to the scammers.
“Our ‘aha!’ moment came pretty quickly once we found the marketing accounting records kept by the scammers,” said OCCRP Data Reporter Malina McLennan.
“Though messy and incomplete, it contained enough information for us to begin cross-referencing batches of invoices, Telegram chats, and various other records to the point where we could start zeroing in on the best case studies. The affiliate marketing industry thrives on self-promotion, conveniently, so it only took a bit of OSINT digging to find some compelling media of some of the scam networks' contractors.”
This is a lucrative business. Leaked records show that in the first seven months of 2024, affiliate marketers working with one of the scam operations were paid at least $7.3 million for leads. Over the same time period in 2023, they earned more than $10.3 million.
Read the full story 
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Many victims said they were enticed to click on the ads after seeing endorsements from celebrities ranging from billionaire Elon Musk to French footballer Kylian Mbappé.
But like the rest of the investment schemes, these too were fake.
One such victim, identified here by the pseudonym Mark, said it was the apparent backing of television presenter and adventurer Ben Fogle, a widely recognised figure in Britain, that convinced him to start trading. Mark had hoped to turn a modest inheritance from his grandfather into enough for a house deposit; he ended up losing over $32,000.
“I feel terrible that people have been swindled out of money by trusting me,” Fogle told OCCRP, who had warned on Instagram in early 2024 that a scam was using his name and likeness to lure victims.
“I can put posts out occasionally warning people that I'm not going to be endorsing cryptocurrencies. And you know, to try and be thoughtful about what you believe and what you don't believe. But when my own mother believes it, it's a hopeless situation.”
Last year Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, announced it was testing the use of facial recognition technology to combat scam ads. But Fogle said that while Facebook complied with a takedown notice for fake articles about his purported investment advice, they soon popped up again.
Read the full story
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Ask Us Anything: Reporters from OCCRP and SVT will be taking questions about the Scam Empire investigation over on Reddit at r/Europe from 3pm CET on Wednesday March 19.
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Unpacking 1.9 Terabytes of Data
An interview with OCCRP Data Journalist Malina McLennan.
Where do you even begin with tackling that amount of data?
“When we first got the leak, we opened batches of each file type, including to some of the audio files - which turned out to be calls between call center agents and victims, or potential victims. We knew that they would be instrumental for storytelling regardless of what was uncovered elsewhere in the leak, so finding ways to filter over a million audio files by language and geography became a priority.”
How did you piece together the relationship between the marketing firms selling personal data, the fake ads, celebrity endorsements and so forth?
“Uploading it all to Aleph gave us a better idea of what we were dealing with, allowing for a second dig into the structure and content of the leak. The OCCRP data team then worked on pulling out batches of information that could help speed up the identification and mapping of the scam — cryptowallets, IBAN numbers, the aliases attached to them, and much more."
“No matter how much data wrangling work went into this leak, though, there was no getting around the fact that hours and hours were spent digging through it all manually to make sense of it all."
Did you start to dream about scams?
"Scams did start to haunt my dreams, yes! But also my day-to-day — I hadn't realised how accustomed I had become to [seeing] scam attempts, from the usual via phone and email, to weird crypto targeted ads everywhere, and even the occasional knock at my front door and. I can't tell if I'm paranoid now or just being reasonable given what the project uncovered about the industry."
What are your hopes for future accountability efforts as a result of your team's reporting?
“I hope that our reporting has driven home just how massive a problem these scam networks are — to the authorities who have struggled to prosecute and prioritise it, to the public figures who have the power to call out the misuse of their image, to the platforms who safeguard their profit over ending their complicity, and to the victims, who will hopefully feel less alone,” McLennan said. “I also hope it will encourage investment into financial literacy education programs. Only the world's worst people want you to believe that you're not smart enough to understand the fundamentals of safe investing.”
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Global Crime and Corruption News
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Rooster To Feather Duster: Venezuela's Former Spy Chief 'The Chicken' Set To Test 'Sovereign Immunity' Rules
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A lawyer for Venezuela’s former spy chief Hugo Carvajal Barrios said he planned to argue in a U.S. court that his client cannot be prosecuted for his alleged role in a state-backed drug cartel, because he has “sovereign immunity” as a representative of a foreign government.
Known as “El Pollo,” or “The Chicken,” Carvajal served as director of military intelligence under Venezuela’s leftist leader Hugo Chavez, as well as his successor and current president, Nicolas Maduro.
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Duterte Arrested on ICC Warrant for Crimes Linked to ‘War on Drugs’: Later this month, former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte will spend his 80th birthday in a prison cell in The Hague. He was detained by Philippines authorities in Manila on Tuesday, in accordance with a warrant issued by the Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court. He is accused of crimes against humanity, over a widespread and systematic campaign of extrajudicial killings carried out between 2011 and 2019 in the name of his brutal so-called ‘War on Drugs’. Read the full story
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OCCRP Wins Multiple SABEW 2024 Best in Business Awards
OCCRP has been recognized with multiple honors at the 2024 Best in Business Awards from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.
Our Dubai Unlocked investigation, conducted in collaboration with over 70 media partners, won in the Data Journalism (Medium Division) category, with judges praising its scope, complexity, and storytelling graphics for “coverage of a topic that hasn’t been fully documented before” — Dubai’s role in global illicit finance.
In the International Reporting (Medium & Small Division) category, Iraq’s Dollar Auction took top honors for uncovering how a U.S.-designed program was exploited to funnel billions to terrorists and fraudsters. Judges called it “a textbook lesson in international investigative journalism.”
The Boston Globe, with contributions from OCCRP, won the Investigative (Medium Division) award for the Globe Spotlight: Steward Health Care series. Additionally, How Private Equity and an Ambitious Landlord Put Steward Health Care on Life Support received an Honorable Mention in the Health/Science (Medium Division) category.
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