Turkey busts Israel-linked 'scam empire' behind alleged $266m fraud

Turkey has dismantled an international criminal network accused of defrauding victims across three continents of about $266 million through telephone-based investment scams, Turkish authorities said.

Police, working with Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MIT) and Interpol, carried out coordinated raids at 236 addresses in Istanbul and Mugla targeting the network known as the "Scam Empire", says the Middle East Eye.

The network had operated investment scams in several countries for about a decade and had previously been investigated by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which identified similar operations based in Israel and Europe.

Victims were allegedly persuaded to invest through platforms controlled by the network and were shown fabricated profits to encourage them to deposit more money. The funds were then transferred to overseas bank accounts and cryptocurrency wallets, according to investigators.

Individual victims lost between $10,000 and hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to information provided about the investigation.

Related OCCRP investigations into call-centre networks operating in Israel, Eastern Europe and Georgia found that more than 32,000 victims worldwide had been persuaded to pay at least $275 million.

Suspected masterminds

Turkish officials identified one of the network's alleged main masterminds as a person referred to by the initials YA, an Israeli national who holds a Portuguese passport.

Turkish officials believe some Israel-based scam networks moved their call-centre operations to Turkey as political tensions between Turkey and Israel increased, in an effort to avoid detection by authorities.

The operators established shell companies posing as call centres and recruited workers who spoke languages including Japanese, Hindi, French and Spanish.

Employees were given roles such as "conversion agents" and "retention agents". New recruits underwent a mandatory one-week training programme, during which they were assigned aliases and instructed to create false personal backgrounds to gain the confidence of potential victims.

Some recruits were told to claim, for example, that they were graduates of Oxford University.

Before starting work, employees were also required to take polygraph tests designed to identify people with links to security or law enforcement agencies.

Rules inside the call centres

The network imposed strict rules on its employees, including a ban on speaking Hebrew inside the offices.

Agents also used different identities and claimed to represent investment platforms whose brand names were regularly changed by the Israeli organisers.

Another rule prohibited agents from targeting Israeli citizens.

Investigators in Turkey assessed that the networks had fostered what they characterized as a "win-win" relationship between Israeli fraud bosses and the state.