Scam call centres are paying up to €1,200 per person for the contact details of potential Irish victims.
And once they have a name and number, it’s game on, with highly-trained fraudsters working the phones to persuade victims to part with their money via bogus investment “opportunities”.
Analysis by The Irish Times has identified 31 Irish victims who lost a combined total of nearly €300,000. This includes a 76-year-old man who lost €61,720, and a high-ranking diplomat who lost more than €31,000.
Details of the transactions are contained in a vast data leak - including recordings of the phones calls - from a Georgian scam call centre which was provided to The Irish Times by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OOCRP), a non-government investigative journalism organisation.
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Irish Times crime and security correspondent Conor Gallagher is part of that project and he explains to In the News exactly how the scams work. And he talks to some of the Irish victims.
But how do these scammers collect the phone numbers they call; how do they identify their victims and what sophisticated sales techniques do they use to persuade unsuspecting victims to “invest” in the bogus schemes?
Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Declan Conlon and Suzanne Brennan.
