18/03/2025
Scam Empire Part One: Inside the dark heart of a multinational investment scam.
Key takeaways:
▪️Scam call centres are destroying lives across the world.
▪️A data leak has unmasked a global network of alleged professional scammers drawing would-be investors onto dodgy trading platforms.
▪️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 boundless.
One of these platforms, SkyMT, briefly shot the lights out before going out of business early last year after roping in estimated deposits of R30-million.
The other two platforms, however, Finbok and Finxo Capital, have gone from strength to strength, collecting deposits of over R240-million from aspirant traders since September 2023.
The problem is, the ‘fintech mogul’ Kodzhov was until recently actually a cleaner working in Bulgaria’s capital Sofia for a modest salary of around R6 800. He has since retired to care for his sick mother and now lives off a government grant. Kodzhov doesn’t speak English and says he has never heard of either his South African companies or those he supposedly owns in other countries.
Another arrival in the local online trading scene is one Diana Gugles, who, as purported owner, sits behind the company Libra Wealth and its trading platform VP Trade.
The platform has roped in at least 2 000 traders, who have between them deposited R64-million – and that’s just since April last year.
Gugles, a professional model, also struggled to recall her fintech start-up which, while based in South Africa, targets investors in South America.
By all appearances, Kodzhov and Gugles have either been the victims of identity theft or have allowed their identities to be used for setting up companies halfway across the world.
Either way, by using the sleek platforms presented by Kodzhov’s and Gugles‘s alleged companies aspirant traders could deal in crypto currencies, foreign exchange, commodities and other things besides, all aided by friendly finance whizzes over the phone.
Or so they thought. They, in this case being several thousand South African “traders” who would in almost all cases never see their money again.
These South African victims have fallen under the sway of the rapidly expanding local leg of a staggering international enterprise simultaneously managing over 70 online trading platforms across the world from a mysterious “back office” spread between Cyprus and Israel.
This nameless multinational syndicate has a staff complement of nearly 500 people targeting aspirant investors everywhere from Australia and Canada to Poland and Japan. If this were not enough, it appears that the organisation has branched out into an online “trading academy” as well as online gambling.
Victims have included South Africans from all walks of life, from pensioners who pinned their hopes on R3 500 investments to business owners who signed over millions.
And on the rare occasion someone got “profit” out, the evidence suggests that this was just bait to keep them putting in more.
Investments from South Africa and elsewhere mostly disappeared into a network of apparent fraud and subterfuge involving shell companies, offshore bank accounts and crypto currency exchanges.
Companies ostensibly run by the unemployed cleaner and model we mentioned at the outset are only the tip of the iceberg.
Beneath the surface lies a spectacular labyrinth of deceit.
This and other minutiae of this clandestine network’s operations have been laid bare in a monumental leak of data originally provided to Sveriges Television, the Swedish national broadcaster, to which amaBhungane has gained access as part of a global consortium of media organisations coordinated by the OCCRP.
The leak contains thousands of recordings from call-centres, screenshots from the computers of individuals managing the scheme as well as many thousands of documents and detailed spreadsheets tabulating everything from the global income of the various “teams” through to the office party expenses of call centre employees.
CONTINUE reading. PUBLISHED in AmaBhungane 06/03/2025.
https://amabhungane.org/scam-empire-part-one-inside-the-dark-heart-of-a-multinational-investment-scam/ #
IMAGE: AmaBhungane.
