Boiler Room: Belgrade call centres at heart of Israeli-linked investment scam

At first glance, Olympus Prime looked more like a thriving tech start-up than one of the many non-descript call centres popping up across Serbia’s capital city. Housed in a high-spec design building within an expanding business district in Belgrade, the company’s neighbours included a Chinese cultural complex and an upscale hotel, BIRN reported.

Yet when Serbian police entered the premises one wet January morning in 2023, they uncovered what fraud experts call a ‘boiler room’ operation, in which unwitting individuals are contacted by phone or email and subjected to high-pressure selling tactics and social engineering to put money into fraudulent investment schemes.

“The offices were completely normal, like any other corporate office; plenty of desks, chairs and computers,” said Boris Majlat, head of the High-Tech Crime Department of the public prosecution service in Belgrade.

The dozens of employees sitting at those desks appeared unflustered by the entrance of armed officers, said Majlat. In fact, they had been prepped for just such an eventuality; in a training video seized during the raid, managers could be seen instructing employees on how to behave in case police came knocking.

“Tell them you’re only offering educational materials,” one said into the camera. “Nothing more.”

The raid was one of 22 carried out the same day in Serbia, Bulgaria and Cyprus, coordinated by Europol and involving considerable manpower and intelligence from Germany. Four call centres were hit, all of them in Belgrade.

Investigators found that employees were assigned to specific language teams tailored to target specific countries, given fake names, fake identities and scripts in order to pose as brokers, gain the trust of their targets and fleece them out of considerable sums of money, sometimes their entire life savings.

The network is believed to have targeted over 70,000 people worldwide, pulling in an estimated 250 million euros by duping people into fake Forex and cryptocurrency investment trading, police in the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg said by email.

In Serbia, 21 people have been charged with fraud totalling an estimated 3.4 million euros in damages. The indictment is yet to be confirmed by the court. The suspected masterminds, however, remain out of reach of authorities.

This investigation, by Investigate Europe and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, has traced the operation in Serbia back to an Israeli couple from Tel Aviv – convicted money launderer Eliran Oved and his wife, Liat Kourtz Oved, both 42 years old – through a series of shell companies, frontmen and connected firms, including a former sponsor of English Premier League football club Leeds United.

Prosecutors in Serbia say that at the Olympus Prime call centre itself, Israelis were ultimately in charge, with day-to-day operations in the hands of Serbian staff members.

The call centre agents were ruthless: according to internal chats, shown to BIRN and IE by a source close to the investigation, they referred to their victims as “idiots”. In one exchange, after an agent stated that a target had 40,000 euros to invest, a colleague replied: “Great, grab it!”

Asked to confirm the connection between the scam and the Oved couple, Majlat said he was unable to comment on an ongoing investigation.

The Oveds and their associates identified in this story have not been charged with any crime in connection with the Belgrade call centre scheme. None of them responded to detailed requests for comment.

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