When Mark, not his real name, first joined a cryptocurrency scam company in Ukraine several years ago, it was not what most Australians might imagine.

The office was bright and airy, fun pop music was pumping out of the speakers and there was free food and drinks on offer to staff.

The employees were young and dressed in office attire, working away happily at their computers.

As a new migrant to Ukraine, Mark said he was lured to the call centre job by the good pay but soon became disillusioned by the work and eventually quit.

He said that during his time in the role, he found Australians to be the number one target for scam calls because they were considered wealthy and trusting.

Scammers also believed that unlike in America, law enforcement in Australia did not go after overseas fraudsters.

“I was told Australians have good money, a good salary,” he told the ABC via Zoom from a dark room in a town in Ukraine.

“Ever since I’ve been in the industry, they’ve never targeted Americans because they believe the American government reacts to certain things like that, and you’re going to be busted in the next couple of months.

“And they saw that Australians do not do much, because this industry has been in Australia for a very long time.”

However, scams are clearly on the rise in the United States too, with the FBI’s latest Cryptocurrency Fraud Report finding:

• Around 32,000 complaints in 2023
• Around US$3 billion ($4.4 billion) in losses to these scams

Meanwhile, data from the Australian government’s ScamWatch found, for investment scams (which would include cryptocurrency scams):

• Around 8,600 reports in 2023
• Around $300 million in losses to these scams

Perceptions of Australians as being “easy prey” is one of the major hurdles to tackling the spread of scams, according to private investigator Ken Gamble, who runs scam recovery company IFW Global.

He explained how authorities in the United States were more likely to go after fraudsters or “anyone that commits any type of crimes against Americans”.

“They have successfully prosecuted and extradited hundreds of fraudsters from overseas, who have committed these types of crimes against Americans,” he said.

“So most of the call centres around the world have America on the Do Not Call list. Traditionally they just don’t call Americans because of the fear of having the FBI come after them.”

He said that there is “no such fear in Australia, because traditionally, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) have never gone after these scammers”.

However, the AFP told the ABC they were attempting to disrupt overseas criminal networks by working with local authorities abroad as well as through their own Joint Policing Cybercrime Coordination Centre (known as JPC3) and the recently-launched Operation Firestorm, which will specifically target scammers in South-East Asia and Eastern Europe.

“The AFP is based in various locations internationally — 33 countries to be exact — and through our international network, we’re able to work with the law enforcement and international partners within those jurisdictions on various crimes, including cyber enabled fraud, which lend into scam centres,”  Detective Inspector Nuckhley Succar from the AFP’s Cybercrime Command said.

When asked by the ABC how many arrests had been made in relation to overseas scams, Mr Succar said: “We don’t have those exact figures. However, we can tell you that given Firestorm is in its infancy, our intent is certainly to undertake in resolution activity across the globe, hopefully commencing in the near future.”

He noted there were significant hurdles to undertaking police activity and arrests in other countries.

“Each jurisdiction around the world operates differently in accordance with their own laws and processes and procedures. We also have our own laws and procedures and processes within the judicial system, for example, that we are authorised by law to operate in.”

How one scam call centre typically operates

Ken Gamble said overseas scam syndicates were sophisticated, organised crime operations that appeared from the outside to be a professional company.

“They’re set up just like a real company,” he said.

“They have a large amount of staff, they have a HR department. These are criminal corporations that employ people for the purpose of manning phones and computers.

“And their role is to contact people and sign people up on platforms and get people to engage in cryptocurrency trading.”

He said many workers are recruited through traditional recruitment platforms and may not even know that they are being employed in a scam centre.

“So they’ll apply for a job as a tele-salesperson, and before long, they’re sitting in Dubai working in a call centre for a Chinese criminal organisation,” he said.

Mark described a nine-hour work day that was arranged around time-zones for each country scammers want to target.

He said they started calling Australia, New Zealand and countries in Asia in the morning, then after lunch they called targets in Europe.

Mark claimed he spoke to around 20 Australians each day and “closed” half a dozen of them, meaning he convinced them to invest their money in the fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme.

But he began to feel guilty about the practice and eventually left the job.

He said he decided to be interviewed by the ABC for the purpose of raising awareness and helping Australians to avoid getting scammed by people like him.

The scammer’s job is to know their victim

Scammers are effective because they are able to lure people in with the promise of making easy money.

“[They are] selling the dream to Australians that if you sign up on this platform, you can make $5,000 a week without getting out of bed,” Mr Gamble said.

“And a lot of Australians are looking for the dream. And they’re very cleverly trained with scripts. They’re told what to say and how to say it.”

Mark said he arrived in a suit and tie on his first day at work and was given a week’s training on the share market and bitcoin, as well as cultural training about each country so they could more effectively swindle them.

“They put you in a classroom and you do exams,” he told the ABC.

While the call centre he was based in was in Ukraine, Mark said it was staffed largely by foreigners due to their command of English.

He said a lot of the work he did at the call centre was psychological and involved telling people “what they want to hear”.

“You have to know your client, that’s the reason why we give you a call. We don’t talk much,” he said.

“Our question is to ask you: you made a registration, what exactly are you looking for? 

“[They tell us], maybe I’m this, maybe I’m that, and we will just give you a question. Are you married? You’re single? Are you still working? Are you an owner of a company?”

He said scammers are told to encourage people with mortgages to use that as leverage for a loan to invest in the scam.

“When you go into the office, you sit on your computer with two big screens in front of you … when I’m talking to you I’m already Googling on the other computer to know much about what I need to tell you. You tell me the city you are from — I Google on the next computer to know about it. I talk with you about the city: ‘oh yeah, there was recently this in your city’, you see? Giving you the conversation makes you feel relaxed and comfortable to tell me everything I need to know.”

He advised Australians not to fall for investment schemes advertised on Facebook or online and to always meet in person with any organisation or individual you might be considering investing in.

“It’s better to stop trying to look for something on the internet which can make you money, and try to go in person [to] the offices,” he said.

Scams are a ‘soul-destroying crime’

Pieter Boele is one of countless Australians who have been caught up in a scam.

The 82-year-old was enjoying a quiet retirement in Sydney when he received an email purporting to contain a news article with a journalist endorsing a crypto trading platform.

The story was fake, but Mr Boele didn’t find out it was a scam until it was too late.

He lost more than $1 million in that scam.

“It’s my fault that I went into it this far without realising this is dangerous,” Mr Boele said.

“And that mistake is easily made, especially if you see things and it’s going well, and you put in $1,000 and then you see $1,000 in crypto in your account, you think it’ll work,” he said.

Just after he lost money in that scam, Mr Boele was targeted by a woman who reached out to him out of the blue on Whatsapp.

They struck up a conversation and over a period of months she recommended he invest in cryptocurrencies.

“I told her ‘I lost a lot of money in crypto’. And she said, ‘Oh, I’m playing in crypto too. And I think it’s an account which is safe’.”

She recommended a platform that Mr Boele invested in but that turned out to be a scam too and he lost all the money he invested.

“It’s a soul destroying crime,” Ken Gamble said.

Mr Gamble said scammers capitalise on a victim’s good will and trusting nature and the cryptocurrency platforms often look very realistic and professional.

“They think they’re making money,” he said.

“What actually happens is the money’s stolen immediately and there is no trading at all.

“The reason they get so many people on the hook is they’re really targeting honest, normal, hard working people.

“Because normal, hard working, honest people would never expect to come across such a sophisticated scam and they wouldn’t expect people to ring them up and talk to them so politely and and build a relationship

“The average victim’s never, ever come across this sort of deception.”

But the impacts of these scams can be life changing, with Mr Gamble saying that “most of the victims of these crimes never, ever recover”.

“They are permanently scarred for life,” he said.

“Somebody at 70 that loses their million dollars of savings cannot recover from this sort of loss.

“So I think that law enforcement underestimate the damage that the toll that this has had on Australians.”

All up, Mr Boele estimates he has lost over $2 million through the scams and it has had a significant impact on his life and marriage.

“It felt terrible, because you think: what happened to it? Why did they do it?” he said.

He is now setting his sights on the banks who allowed him to transfer his money to Australian bank accounts, which he thought belonged to cryptocurrency trading platforms but were actually owned by scammers.

He wants more measures in place to stop scammers opening bank accounts under false identities with fraudulent documents.

The government recently introduced legislation to place new obligations on banks and other industries to prevent scams and could force bank to pay compensation and face a large penalty.

What can be done to stamp out scams?

Mr Gamble said the crime syndicates operating overseas scam call centres should be the target.

“This is a war against scammers,” he said.

“This requires a real, hardcore, confronting response. Law enforcement dropped the ball badly on this issue.”

He has called for ”more proactive reinforcement” and said police and regulators need to go over to countries where the scammers are operating and arrest those involved.

He has also urged authorities to dismantle their operations and disrupt their money laundering networks around the world.

“No different to what we do with drug traffickers and people that are involved in child exploitation and all the other serious crimes, human trafficking,” he said.

“It needs the same level of response to all those other serious crimes.”

However he acknowledged there were significant hurdles to overcome.

“In some cases there’s no prospect of extradition, because those perpetrators may be in a country where there is no extradition treaty with Australia,” he said.

The government has already implemented several measures to tackle scams.

The ACCC has established the National Anti Scam Centre where Australians can report a scam.

Earlier this year the Australian Federal Police launched Operation Firestorm to try to tackle international scams in South-East Asia and Eastern Europe, a part of its Joint Policing Cybercrime Coordination Centre (JPC3) to tackle cybercrime.

Mr Gamble said it didn’t go far enough and in a parliamentary submission his company IFW Global slammed the response from law enforcement and called for more collaboration between AFP, ASIC and other agencies.

“There has been some great work done with the JPC3 so far, but I don’t believe the JPC3 has the capacity to handle the amount of fraud that’s coming into Australia still on a daily basis,” he said.

Mr Gamble is calling for a national cyber fraud task force to focus on tackling overseas syndicates that target Australians.

The AFP’s Detective Inspector Nuckhley Succar said “Operation Firestorm looks to leverage our extensive international network and our partnerships with foreign law enforcement, along with our domestic partnerships with Commonwealth, State and Territory partners, to target offshore scam centres that are impacting the Australian community.”

In a statement, ASIC said that “the vast majority of investment scam activity that ASIC sees originates from perpetrators in foreign jurisdictions”.

“ASIC’s enforcement powers do not extend to foreign jurisdictions, which is why our efforts are focused on scam detection and disruption,” it told the ABC.

“So far, these efforts have seen 7,300 scam websites – including 615 cryptocurrency investment scams – removed from the internet, with more being taken down every day.”