Security1 publisher2 min readPublished
Alleged bribes from 500 scam call centers cost Ukraine its prosecutor general
NABU says investment-fraud call centers bought protection from inside the Prosecutor General's Office. The deputy arrested for it ran the department that handles requests from foreign prosecutors.
The Watch · Security desk
What happened
- Ukraine's prosecutor general Ruslan Kravchenko resigned on Monday over allegations that people in his office took bribes to protect scam call centers, hours after telling President Zelenskyy he had no plans to go.
- NABU arrested Serhiy Kropyva, deputy head of the office's Department of International Cooperation; he has been fired and held until November.
- NABU's report last week described a department head taking money to ignore call centers that cold-called Ukrainians and foreigners into fake investment platforms and emptied their accounts.
- Ukrainska Pravda's law enforcement sources put the network at more than 100 centers last year and about 500 this year, a fivefold rise that pulled more police attention onto the scheme.
- Police closed 94 call centers in August and further sites in Kyiv, Dnipro and Nikolaev in September, part of an operation NABU and SAPO have been running for months as Project Carthage.
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Why it matters
- exposure The official arrested sat on the international cooperation desk, so any foreign prosecutor who routed a request about these call centers to Kyiv since 2024 has to treat the intake point as compromised until the investigation says otherwise.
- cost Bail of 120 million hryvnias recovers about 23 days of the alleged monthly bribe income. The victims of the fake investment platforms recover nothing through this case.
- contradiction NABU attached no names to its recordings; the identification of the prosecutor general as Chef comes from Ukrainska Pravda's unnamed law enforcement sources, and Kravchenko says he committed no crimes and calls his exit political.
- precedent Georgia arrested its former spy chief in a comparable probe late last year, which makes senior state protection a purchasable input for call-center fraud in the region rather than a Ukrainian anomaly.
The protection fee was priced per site. Ukrainska Pravda, citing law enforcement sources, reports $7,000 a month from each call center, which at more than 100 centers put roughly $700,000 a month into the hands of corrupt officials in the Prosecutor General's Office [5]. At about 500 centers this year the same rate yields $3.5 million a month [6]. Multiply by twelve and the flow is around $42 million a year [1]. That is a standing line item in a fraud business, and the growth in site count is what NABU and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office spent months tracking under the name Project Carthage [8].
Kropyva's title places him at the center of this. He was Deputy Head of the Department of International Cooperation in the Office of the Prosecutor General [2], the desk through which foreign legal assistance requests reach Ukrainian prosecutors. NABU's published allegation is domestic: bribes paid so that a department head would look away from call centers cold-calling Ukrainians and foreigners into fake investment platforms [3]. Neither NABU's report nor Ukrainska Pravda's account, as published, identifies a single cross-border request that was slowed or dropped. There is room to infer a structural link, though no documentation yet supports it.
What NABU has put out is audio. The recordings feature an official of the Prosecutor General's Office working under the pseudonym Chancellor, taking orders from someone called Chef, alongside accomplices named Muza, Flesh, and Kamrad, and the video attaches no real names to any of them [9]. NABU says the recruitment started last year with one of the heads of the office's structural units and spread to other employees [4]. Investigators searched Kravchenko's own office in a night raid, which the office denied before confirming it once Kropyva was in custody [12].
Scope is where the case looks narrow against the network it describes. NABU says it is currently pursuing five individuals, which leaves Flesh, Chancellor's assistant, at large [15]. Police detained Kropyva's driver Serhii Kutsyi and Yelyzaveta Ivakhnenko on Monday, taken in the recordings to be Kamrad and Muza [14]. Against the 500-center figure, the past month's closures of more than 100 sites leave roughly 400 unaccounted for [7][2]. By that count the bribery case is running well ahead of the takedown.
What to watch
- Whether SAPO charges Kravchenko himself or treats the resignation as the end of the matter.
- Whether any foreign jurisdiction states publicly that a Ukrainian legal assistance request on these call centers stalled in 2024 or 2025.
- Whether September closures keep August's pace once the political story cools.