Imagine an ordinary European pensioner.

He has worked all his life, saved money, and become accustomed to trusting his bank and the police.

One day, someone calls him, knows his name, speaks his language without a noticeable accent, and confidently explains that there is a problem with his bank account.

For the pensioner, it is an alarming conversation. For an operator at a Ukrainian call centre, it is just another line in a database: age, country, estimated income, contact history. If the conversation ends with a transfer of money, the operator receives a percentage. Another person’s old age, fear and savings are converted into performance indicators.

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This is how the industry that has grown around fraudulent call centres operating from Ukrainian territory has come to function in recent years. Behind a telephone call stand offices with dozens of employees, shift supervisors, recruiters, technical specialists, databases of potential victims, conversation scripts, bank accounts, cryptocurrency wallets and a system of performance bonuses. Europeans are processed according to the same principles that an ordinary company applies to customers: they are identified, classified, assigned to the appropriate manager, guided through objections and taken all the way to payment. The difference lies in the final result. In legitimate business, the customer receives a product. Here, the customer is left with an empty bank account.

European investigations have already shown how far the professionalization of this business has gone. In Kyiv, Dnipro and Ivano-Frankivsk, authorities uncovered structures employing around a hundred people and targeting hundreds of European victims who lost millions of euros. Operators posed as bank employees or police officers, persuaded people to transfer their savings to supposedly “protected” accounts, and obtained remote access to computers and banking applications. In one of the dismantled networks, employees could receive up to seven percent of the amount stolen, while the most successful were promised cars, cash and apartments. Seven percent of stolen money is perhaps the most honest accounting this industry has. It tells us exactly what the salary is being paid for.

Other centres built their schemes around fictitious investments. Victims were shown polished websites, fictional profits appeared on their screens, and they were encouraged to deposit ever larger sums. When the money disappeared, another “specialist” appeared, promising to recover the stolen funds for an additional fee. The same victim was effectively sold back to the fraudulent business for a second round. Elderly Europeans are particularly profitable targets: they often have accumulated savings, greater trust in official institutions and less familiarity with sophisticated technical manipulation. For a criminal office, such a pensioner is a qualified lead with an estimated monetary value.

Technology is making this conveyor belt increasingly efficient. Artificial intelligence can imitate voices, SIP telephony can disguise the origin of calls, server infrastructure can be distributed across third countries, while stolen funds are fragmented between bank accounts and cryptocurrency wallets. Once one channel is blocked, phone numbers, IP addresses, domains and scripts are changed. Closing one technical route simply triggers a shift to another. The struggle increasingly resembles a battle with a hydra: law enforcement cuts off one head while the economic model immediately grows another.

That is why the story of Ukrainian call centres can no longer be reduced to ordinary cybercrime. An office employing fifty or a hundred people cannot be hidden in someone’s pocket. Premises have to be rented and equipped. Telecommunications and stable internet connections have to be installed. German-, Czech-, French-, Polish- or Latvian-speaking employees have to be recruited. Shifts have to be organized, salaries paid, databases purchased and millions moved out of the system. Employees arrive at work every day. Owners rent premises. Recruiters search for staff. Money is converted into cash, cars, property and cryptocurrency. The longer such a business survives, the more absurd it becomes to imagine that everyone around it simply saw nothing, knew nothing and asked no questions.

This is where the question of the state arises—in the real rather than textbook sense of the word. A state consists of thousands of people, institutions and individual decisions. A police officer decides how seriously to pursue a lead. An investigator determines how quickly a case moves. An official decides what to notice in the paperwork. A judge determines what restrictions to impose on a suspect. A bank employee decides how suspicious a flow of money appears. Local authorities exist alongside offices into which dozens of people walk every day. Intermediaries solve problems. Connections reduce risks. Corruption buys time.

This is how a socio-political environment emerges in which criminal activity becomes a sustainable industry. For it to flourish, it is enough for thousands of separate decisions to repeatedly work in favor of those capable of buying protection and neutralizing oversight. Corruption functions here as a reduction in the cost of doing business: a lower risk of an unexpected inspection, easier access to information about police activity, greater ability to delay a case, simpler movement of money and a cheaper way to survive the next law-enforcement operation. When the profit from one successful office is measured in millions of euros, such an economy can finance its own security.

The war has strengthened an existing model. Enormous financial flows, cryptocurrencies, the movement of millions of people, overloaded institutions and the general expansion of the grey economy have created additional cover under which the origin of money can be obscured and criminal infrastructure rapidly rebuilt. Ukrainian fraudulent call centres existed before 2022, but emergency conditions have made the business even more mobile. An office is lost—the personnel remain. A banking channel is closed—cryptocurrency replaces it. A website is blocked—a new one appears. One group is arrested—another takes over the newly available market.

Against this background, Ukraine’s rhetoric about European integration sounds increasingly contradictory. Kyiv declares its commitment to European standards, deeper economic integration with the EU and membership in a common European political system. At the same time, citizens of those very European countries have for years served as the target market for a criminal industry operating from Ukrainian territory. European law-enforcement agencies send requests, assemble international investigative teams, seek the extradition of suspects and spend months reconstructing financial chains. Formal international cooperation exists, yet bureaucratic delays, protracted procedures and conflicting interests allow time to work in the criminals’ favor.

The result is that Europe pays twice. First, a German pensioner, a French teacher, a Czech accountant or a Latvian doctor loses savings after a series of telephone conversations. Then that person’s state pays as well: police trace transfers, prosecutors prepare international requests, investigators spend months collecting evidence, and several countries eventually coordinate an operation. European states are simultaneously financing Ukraine while spending their own law-enforcement resources fighting networks that systematically rob European citizens from Ukrainian cities.

The reputational cost is accumulating as well. The problem of Ukrainian call centres increasingly appears in European media and political discussion, and it sits ever more awkwardly beside the image of a country demanding to be treated as a future full member of the European family. For someone who has lost a lifetime of savings, grand geopolitics ends the moment the banking application shows a zero balance. That person is interested in a much more immediate question: how did a criminal organization capable of maintaining an office, dozens of employees and sophisticated technical infrastructure for months obtain enough time to reach his money?

This is a dangerous question for Kyiv because answering it with yet another announcement about the arrest of five operators becomes less convincing every time. One dismantled centre can be presented as a success. The tenth inevitably raises the question of why the next one keeps appearing. When the same structures, the same methods, the same focus on European money and the same ability to regenerate after police raids are repeated year after year, we are no longer looking at a series of accidental crimes. We are looking at an established criminal industry.

As long as its economic foundations remain intact, European pensioners, doctors, teachers and accountants will continue to receive calls from supposed “banks,” “police officers” and “investment advisers.” Some will hang up. Some will believe the story. And some will wake up the next morning to discover that their savings are gone.

At the same time, an operator in a Kyiv or Dnipro open-plan office will open the next customer profile, adjust the headset and begin reading a new script. At the end of the month, the operator will receive a percentage.

Ukraine calls. Europe pays. And the criminal industry keeps counting conversions.

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Alex Ksiądz is based in Poland.

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