Italian and Albanian Authorities Break Up Crypto Scam Ring

Italian and Albanian authorities have broken up an organized crime group’s crypto scam.

The group had stolen an estimated 15 million euros (about $16 million), the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation (Eurojust) said in a Monday (Dec. 19) press release.

The group operated from a call center in Albania, contacting victims via unidentifiable phone numbers and offering “zero risk” investments in cryptocurrencies, according to the press release.

They delivered to the victims an immediate financial gain on a small investment and then, having gained the victims’ trust, convinced them to invest all their capital, the release said.

Once the victims had transferred those funds, the criminals embezzled the money and made themselves untraceable, per the release.

In a third part of the fraud, other members of the organized crime group contacted the victims and convinced them to make additional payments that they said would enable them to recover the lost funds, according to the press release.

The investigation led by Italian and Albanian authorities, with Eurojust facilitating cross-border cooperation, seized 160 electronic devices, a mobile phone and assets worth 3 million euros (about $3.2 million), the release said.

This announcement comes two weeks after French authorities charged two people with fraud and money laundering after they allegedly promised counterfeit cash or digital wallets for cryptocurrency and then stole the funds.

Bloomberg reported on Dec. 9 that the scammers set up fake identities, arranged meetings with victims, received crypto assets from the victims and then got access to the funds through the victims’ phones.

The fraudsters stole at least 2 million euros (about $2.1 million), according to the report.

In the United States, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) said on Nov. 10 that it received more than 8,300 complaints related to crypto-assets between October 2018 and September 2022 and that 40% of these complaints involved frauds and scams.

“Our analysis of consumer complaints suggests that bad actors are leveraging crypto-assets to perpetrate fraud on the public,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said at the time. “Americans are also reporting transaction problems, frozen accounts and lost savings when it comes to crypto-assets.”