amaBhungane | Scam Empire Part 1: Inside the dark heart of a multinational investment scam

Scam Empire: Inside A Merciless International Investment Scam

An unprecedented leak exposes the inner workings of a global investment-scam industry, where ruthless call center agents make millions while destroying lives around the world.

amaBhungane | Scam Empire Part 1: Inside the dark heart of a multinational investment scam

A data leak unmasked a global network of alleged professional scammers drawing would-be investors into dodgy trading platforms on industrial scale. South Africans feature in parts of the business, and the SA public is prominent among the victims.

Maltese firm features in global investment scam money trail

A Maltese payment company features in a global investment scam money trail that has seen victims from all walks of life and dozens of countries, fall prey to professional fraudsters.  An investigation by the Organised Crimes and Corruption Reporting Project and its media partners, including Times of Malta and Amphora Media, offers new insights into...

1. What is the Scam Empire investigation and what does it reveal?Scam Empire, the Fraud Empire, is an investigation carried out by the media consortium OCCRP, to which infoLibre belongs, Swedish public television SVT and 30 other media outlets in several countries. Based on 1.9 terabytes of leaked data, journalists have uncovered two groups of call-centers, based in Israel and Eastern Europe, the first, and Georgia, the second, whose employees h…

Scam Empire Part One: Inside the dark heart of a multinational investment scam - AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism

A little-known Bulgarian entrepreneur named Boris Kodzhov has, since 2023, quietly made mammoth strides in the South African fintech sector.Kodzhov seemingly launched not one but three multi-million-rand online trading platforms for complicated financial products called ‘contracts for difference’ (CFD). Their defining characteristic is that you can very rapidly lose all your money, but the potential rewards, marketers will tell you, are boundles…