Syedur Rahman and Ulrich Schmidt detail the cross-border, coordinated action taken against a long-running criminal operation.
Authorities have dismantled a cross-border cryptocurrency investment scam that defrauded victims in 23 countries.
Eurojust (the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation) and Europol (the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation) supported the operation, which tackled a cryptocurrency fraud scheme worth more than €100 million across Europe.
The action, which had been requested by Spanish and Portuguese authorities, resulted in the arrest of five suspects, including the alleged mastermind of the scheme; which had run for seven years.
Victims, including individuals from Germany, France, Italy, Spain and other countries were promised huge returns on cryptocurrency investments via professionally-designed online platforms. Once they tried to recover their investments, they were asked to pay additional fees. Once they paid those fees, the website used to conduct the fraud simply disappeared.
Authorities in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Romania and Bulgaria conducted searches and froze bank accounts. Eurojust supported a joint Spanish-Lithuanian investigation team, while Europol sent a cryptocurrency expert to help investigators in Portugal. The coordinated action also used European Arrest Warrants and Investigation Orders.
Crypto scams are very often multinational, as they are designed to exploit the borderless, decentralised and often pseudonymous nature of cryptocurrencies. This allows fraudsters to evade local law enforcement in their victims’ countries. In many cases, the fraudsters are not even based on the same continent as those they defraud. This creates the need for the type of multinational response that has been seen in this case.
