The prosecutor's office allegedly provided protection to illegal call centers whose employees swindled residents of Ukraine and the European Union — including Poland — out of millions of euros.
On Monday evening, September 7, following a lengthy meeting at the presidential headquarters on Bankova Street in Kyiv, Ukraine's Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko tendered his resignation. Crucial to this outcome were the head of state's prior conversations with the leaders of increasingly powerful institutions — Kyrylo Kryvonos, Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), and Oleksandr Klymenko, head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO).
If they presented strong evidence of Kravchenko's guilt, Volodymyr Zelensky had to quickly "cut loose the dead weight" — recent weeks have been rife with fresh scandals and affairs. In public perception, responsibility for these falls on the president, as the linchpin of the entire system; nevertheless, the consequences — in the form of reputational damage and mounting governability problems — may be borne by the whole country.
Fraud on an international scale
The prosecutor's resignation was triggered by a scandal that erupted in connection with an investigation conducted by NABU detectives. It emerged that the deputy director of the Department of International Cooperation, Serhiy Kropyva, known by the alias "Chancellor," who had been detained earlier, was allegedly the main coordinator of extortion payments collected from the owners of illegal so-called call centers, working closely with "the boss" — most likely Kravchenko himself, for whom Kropyva reportedly oversaw the renovation of a villa in the prestigious Kyiv suburb of Kozyn.
Illegal call centers constitute a well-organized business. As many as 1,500 may be operating in Ukraine, employing around 60,000 people. According to the Swiss-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, their annual turnover may reach USD 12 billion — roughly 5.5% of Ukraine's GDP.
The mechanism is simple and effective. Criminals place calls while posing as banks, technical support staff, or law enforcement representatives. They then persuade their targets to carry out financial transactions or direct them to fraudulent investment platforms. The ultimate goal is to gain access to personal data and bank accounts, and consequently to extort money.
These call centers have their own managers, HR and IT support departments, employee training systems, and ready-made call scripts. They rely on fake websites, forged documents, and the full range of infrastructure needed to operate on a large scale. They have become a significant part of Ukraine's criminal economy, as well as a source of corrupt income for the security services.
It is an open secret that individual agencies — including ones with great merit in resisting Russia, such as the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) or the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense (HUR) — also have a dark side: providing protection (Ukrainian: dakh, Russian: krysha) for criminal activity in exchange for a cut of the profits. And not only from call centers — investigative journalists in Ukraine estimate the "cut" from a single call center at USD 7,000 per month — but also from illegal gambling venues such as roulette clubs and slot-machine parlors.
One thread of the operation — which NABU investigators dubbed "Carthage" — concerns attempts by a group within the Prosecutor General's Office to take over protection of a certain number of call centers, or to expand that number, or to raise the protection fees charged to them.
A wunderkind of the Ukrainian justice system
The investigation, likely to span multiple threads, will probably take years to conclude — but it has already ended Ruslan Kravchenko's career. In June of last year, at just 35 years old, he became the youngest Prosecutor General in Ukraine's history, despite widespread criticism over his lack of experience and suspicions of corruption.
In 2023, irregularities surrounding the privatization of a state-owned apartment prevented him from winning the competition to head NABU, and earlier — according to the watchdog Anti-Corruption Action Center — also kept him from securing a position at SAPO. Nevertheless, recent years brought him a string of successes: he served as lead prosecutor in the case against former President Viktor Yanukovych, securing his conviction for state treason in 2019. After Volodymyr Zelensky came to power, Kravchenko quickly entered his inner circle, holding posts including governor of Kyiv Oblast and head of the State Tax Service. He served just over a year as Prosecutor General. Time will tell whether he follows the path of his predecessors, several of whom went on to serve as ambassadors — including to the Netherlands and Switzerland — after their dismissals, though for the coming months he will likely be occupied with giving testimony.
Call centers and the Polish connection
The problem of call centers has long ceased to be purely an internal Ukrainian matter, nor are Ukrainians their only targets. Victims are also recruited in Russia and across Europe, including Poland.
As early as 2024, Polish Radio reported that officers of Ukraine's Bureau of Economic Security had shut down a call center near Kharkiv where 21 people were engaged in defrauding Polish citizens.
A year later, the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Łódź reported on an international investigation into fraud committed using fake investment platforms, estimating that more than 600 Polish citizens had been defrauded of a combined total of up to PLN 26 million.
In May of this year, in a case led by Poland's Central Bureau for Combating Cybercrime (CBZC) and the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Kraków, Ukrainian services shut down three call centers, with Polish citizens among the victims.
What offers grounds for optimism is the strong cooperation between Polish and Ukrainian services in prosecuting these crimes — because more cases will certainly follow.
Tadeusz Iwański — Head of the Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova Team at the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW). From 2006 to 2011, he worked for Polish Radio’s External Service.