Security1 publisher2 min readPublished
Ukrainian scam call centres kept growing through three years of publicised raids
NABU and SAPO detectives went in by ladder at Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office on 4 September, in a case Ukrainska Pravda's law enforcement sources trace to prosecutors taking a cut of the fraud.
The Watch · Security desk
What happened
- NABU and SAPO officers reached the central entrance of Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office at about 7pm on 4 September, were refused entry despite a court warrant, climbed in by ladder, and one officer was injured.
- Ukrainska Pravda's sources in the anti-corruption bodies say operation Carthage was scheduled for several days later and was brought forward on the Friday once it looked as if the subjects were scattering.
- Serhii Kropyva, known as Chancellor and the case's main suspect so far, was arrested in Lviv rather than Kyiv, with three minor children and the option of leaving the country at any moment.
- The prosecutor general's own room was locked until detectives prepared to force it, Kravchenko was neither there nor at home that night, and the paper's political sources place him at the Office of the President.
- The Prosecutor General's Office first denied Ukrainska Pravda's report of searches at the prosecutor general and confirmed it only the following day.
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Why it matters
- exposure Retail customers at Ukrainian and EU banks are losing money to offices whose continued operation, on this account, depended on cover inside Ukraine's prosecution service, so their exposure now turns on a Kyiv corruption case no bank is party to.
- constraint If the cover sits with prosecutors, a publicised closure relocates an operation rather than ending it, which makes raid counts and press-released takedowns useless as a measure of whether the fraud pipeline is shrinking.
- contradiction The central allegation of prosecutors taking a cut reaches readers through rivals of the Prosecutor General's Office inside competing agencies, so what is being weighed is a turf account against a case file nobody outside NABU has seen.
- precedent A barricaded door and a ladder entry at the country's central prosecution building set the expectation for how the next warrant served on a Ukrainian law enforcement body gets executed.
The word Ukrainska Pravda's sources use for the arrangement is "roof": cover supplied from inside the system, in this case by individual representatives of the Prosecutor General's Office [23]. That mechanism fits the record better than any story about detection. Isolated searches and closures were reported year after year, and the number of offices and of victims rose anyway [7]. From the 2023 newsroom argument about why every law enforcement agency was fighting call centres that would not die [1], and the question put to President Zelensky about a state that "seemingly cannot defeat some call centres, which every day and right now rob millions of our citizens" [4], to the searches of 4 September is about three years [3]. Ukrainska Pravda's own reading is that the real growth came after that publicity, not before it [5].
Ruslan Kravchenko took the prosecutor general's job in June 2025 [1], which put him roughly fifteen months in post when the detectives arrived [2]. Four months in, around October 2025, an influential figure in another law enforcement body told the paper that the Prosecutor General's Office "act aggressively, nailing everyone who disagrees along the way" [11][4]. Competitors in law enforcement, speaking off the record, said the office had decided to take its share of the pie [10]. By early 2026 the backroom talk about prosecutors' involvement in the call centres had intensified [12]. For two years before that, none of the paper's sources in political, business or law enforcement circles disputed that the offices survive because of law enforcement; one officer put it as everyone knowing where the call centres work, how many there are and who owns them [8].
The part that reaches bank fraud teams is the part they cannot act on. Bankers were already reporting heavy client losses in 2023, and citizens of European countries were already among the victims [2]; complaints from EU states continued through the following years [6]. None of the evidence in this account concerns how the calls are placed or what the scripts say. It concerns who kept the doors open, and the local tell was a street-level one: expensive cars driven by officially unemployed young men [3].
Whether the roof allegation reaches the prosecutor general himself is unresolved in the material. Sources around Kravchenko told Ukrainska Pravda he had taken an operational pause to work out whether a suspicion notice was coming for him too [21].
What to watch
- Whether NABU and SAPO serve a suspicion notice on Kravchenko himself, or stop at the Carthage suspects already detained.
- Whether the Carthage file names which offices operated under prosecutorial cover, and how many, which this account does not state.
- Whether the next NABU warrant served at a Ukrainian law enforcement building is honoured at the door or met the same way.