Dutch police said Wednesday they have taken down an international investment fraud operation that allegedly used fake cryptocurrency platforms, call centers and long-running social engineering to steal from tens of thousands of people worldwide.
The numbers are not small. According to police, the organization had operated since at least 2021, ran about two dozen call centers in multiple countries and employed more than 700 people who presented themselves as financial advisers. Investigators said the scheme brought in more than €100 million, about $114 million, each month.
The alleged ringleader is a 46-year-old man with Israeli and Polish citizenship. Dutch police did not name him, but described him as a “well-known hacker” and said he was “no stranger to the cyber world.” He was arrested in May at an airport in Poland after arriving from Dubai, then extradited to the Netherlands. A Dutch judge ordered him held in pretrial detention.
Police also reported arrests of two Dutch nationals and one Belgian national living in Cyprus, another suspect in Belgium and a Dutch national in Greece. Investigators said the case is still open and more arrests may follow.
How the alleged scam worked
Police described a classic investment con with modern crypto plumbing. Victims were steered toward what looked like real cryptocurrency trading sites and were first pushed to deposit modest sums. The platforms then showed strong returns, according to investigators, giving victims a reason to send more money.
Those profits were fake, police said. The money was not invested. It went to the criminal organization, often through cryptocurrency payments.
The grooming was deliberate. Police said employees spent weeks or months building trust by phone and online before pressing victims for larger deposits. The organization allegedly used fake names, hid employee locations and relied on technical tools to mask identities. Investigators said the main suspect’s technical skills helped the group avoid law enforcement for years.
In the Netherlands alone, police estimate victims lost nearly €25 million. Worldwide, investigators believe tens of thousands of people were defrauded. Police said some victims did not know they had been scammed until investigators contacted them, stopping at least some additional payments.
Victims describe financial collapse
The damage was not limited to bank balances. In testimony released by police, a Dutch victim identified only as Alex said the contact with the supposed advisers suddenly ended, which made clear the investment had been a fraud. He said he was angry with himself and that the future he had imagined “collapsed.”
RTL, a Dutch local media outlet, reported that one victim said he lost so much money he could no longer buy food for his family. Another told the outlet that losing his life savings led him to consider suicide.
Dutch police are framing the case as a large, structured criminal business rather than a loose group of online scammers. The evidence described so far points to the machinery behind the fraud: hired callers, fake identities, counterfeit trading dashboards and enough technical cover to keep the operation running across borders for years.
This story draws on original reporting from The Record.
