The Billion Dollar Scam - BBC World Service Documentaries

Fraud is greater than ever. Last year, victims reported losing £4 billion in the UK. Most people never show up. Oh here we go. Hi, this is Jen. Oh, I'm so glad we're finally talking. With Alex's help, I'm now talking to Milton scammers. Patrick works for one of his brands, Coinevo. Thank you. Thank you so much. I want to see what kind of promises they make to convince me to invest. How much money do you think I can make in a month doing this? This type of profitability is impossible to promise. To show how this scam works, I deposit $500 in Bitcoin and arrange another time to talk to Patrick.

The Milton group has thousands of victims. Many lose much more than the BBC allows me to contribute. I'm simply going to transfer the money to you. Okay, one second. I'm on my way to meet Londoner Barry Burnett, who started £10 trading after signing up with a prominent Milton brand, EverFX. When he saw how well his portfolio seemed to be performing, he invested more. He told us that he let his trading advisor take control of his computer and do the trading for him. This should never happen. He then he started losing money. And that's when Milton's scammers asked him to invest even more.

Put some more money. Double it. If you invest £25,000 you will be able to offset your losses and make a profit. And I said, no, I'm not going to do that, absolutely not, I just want to reduce my losses to a manageable amount and I want to get out. And I must have received at least half a dozen calls from half a dozen people in the space of about 2 hours. My phone kept blowing up, basically begging me to put in more money. Barry says he lost more than £10,000. His experience fits a pattern. What if I told you that we have spoken to people at the company and they told us that everything was a scam?

I am horrified. I'm numb. I can't believe this, because I was never going to get that back, so I could almost think that the moment I put that ten thousand

dollar

s in his account, that was it. It just disappeared. You know, it's disgusting on every level. You know, it just makes me sick thinking about it, to be honest. I can imagine the misery they have inflicted on other people's lives. So how did these companies do it? How do they get so many people to trust them? The brand Barry used, EverFX, was established through a high-profile sponsorship deal with one of Europe's biggest football clubs, Sevilla FC.

It's game day. Two of the most important clubs in Spain play their local derby. Over two years, the Milton group spent approximately €7 million with Sevilla FC to promote their EverFX brand, including brilliant promotional videos like this one. Sevilla even use some of their most important players to unknowingly sell the Melton brand. I didn't know much about trading, but EverFX told me everything I needed to know. Forex and football are unpredictable industries, but these guys have all the material needed to help new traders like me. So thank you EverFX. EverFX: main global sponsor of the Seville football club.

Their sponsorship deal ended shortly after EverFX was banned by the UK Financial Conduct Authority. But not before having defrauded 17,000 investors in Spain alone. Many of the club's fans know people who have lost money in these scams. Hi Mark, I'm fine. I am in Seville. On a side street I went to talk to someone who also investigates these scams. Mark Solomons works for an Australian investigation company trying to recover money for victims. The thing about the Milton group is that they tend to ask people for a certain amount and then they move on and like to work en masse.

I mean the EverFX logo, it's hard to imagine that most fans haven't been exposed to it. It must be because you are giving them access to a particular demographic that is perhaps prone to gambling. The brand awareness these offers generate is essential to making these scams appear trustworthy. We found that 40% of English Prime Ministers signed sponsorship deals with suspected scam brands outside the Milton group. This includes Chelsea, Everton, Fulham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester City, Southampton and Tottenham. All were investigated by regulators, fined by regulators, investigated by police or banned by the Financial Conduct Authority, including FXVC, who sponsored Leeds United until 2021, when they were banned by the Financial Conduct Authority.

While Leeds were doing promotions like this. FXVC scammed hundreds of thousands of pounds while using its sponsorship to appear legitimate. The idea that we have been manipulated by a company like that would really turn my stomach. I'm quite upset, because it was also advertised a lot and could also be done from the website. So, to be honest, I'm not very happy. Yes. After seeing FXVC sponsoring Leeds United, Phil and Joyce invested £1000 with them. The call center soon got to work. His words to me were, “Oh, I will take care of you as if you were my own mother.” One of the main things he said to me was, "Phil, do you realize you're going to be a millionaire?" Despite the extraordinary promises, the couple says they believed FXVC was a reputable trading platform.

Why would they allow that type of company to support Leeds United, a top football club? Because? It just doesn't make sense to me. So I took at face value that they were a good and reputable company. Phil invested more. He bet £100,000 that the price of Bitcoin would rise and his account showed a profit of £85,000 in one weekend. So they put in more and more. He said all the time that you can withdraw your money, no problem. Withdraw your money whenever you want. But when they started losing money, his account manager told them his balance had fallen below a threshold.

So, to get the remaining money, they would have to invest more. So they did, and then they lost everything. We had lost £341,000 in seven days. They don't care who they hurt, they don't care who they take money from. Do not care. He knew that he was deeply distressed by it and knew that he would feel humiliated and ashamed. He literally clung to me that day, just apologizing and saying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I was stupid, I was stupid. At Leeds United, they have a duty of care to ensure that the people associated with them are legitimate businesses and do not commit these types of scams.

Leeds United told us that "as soon as we found out that FXVC had lost its license the agreement was terminated." FXVC, denied any wrongdoing and told us they fully complied with the FCA ruling. Premier League clubs that responded said deals were terminated early, were not renewed or that allegations against potential scam companies only came after sponsorship deals ended. And Sevilla FC told us that once the contract ended there was no further contact with EverFX. While these brilliant videos may be history, to date no one from EverFX or FXVC has been prosecuted for these scams. One of the reasons is that criminal investigations are very complex, expensive and scammers always seem to be one step ahead.

In Britain, the police have not pursued the case of any of the victims we have spoken to. Oliver Bullough was a reporter in the former Soviet Union, but now writes about money laundering and the offshore world. Am I surprised to learn that the British police have done nothing about this? No. That sounds wearily familiar. If you're famous, they'll be interested. But if, you know, Mr. or Mrs. Smith has lost their retirement savings 40 grand, 50 grand, 60 grand. They send a report and nothing will happen. Oliver believes scammers hide behind a complex series of offshore companies to protect their true identity.

Whether he does it as an investigative journalist or, more likely, as a law enforcement agent, he should go to each of those jurisdictions, write them a letter, aformal process and then receive information about the ownership of that company. That can take six months. It may take you a year. It may not be possible at all. So the point of complexity is to make things incomprehensible and essentially try to force other people to give up. I'm not going to give up, but I need help. In a quiet town in Germany, I hear that the fight against Milton is underway.

It's an unlikely hub for the high-tech fight against scammers. The cybercrime unit here, unlike in the UK, is making arrests across Europe and beyond. Nice to meet you. Pleased to meet you. Using digital techniques, the team can follow crime to the dark portals of the deepest parts of the Internet and hunt down its perpetrators. It is run by prosecutors, who methodically gather evidence and forensically track the huge sums of money it generates. They are operating as professional legal companies, and that's what we say. This is organized crime. And how much money do some of these large organized groups spend?

Do criminal groups bring in? Probably hundreds of millions per year. Investigating financial scams like these means following the money. So let's say we have a victim from any platform and we know that he transferred his money to this bank account of any company here in Germany. And then we have all the transactions of the company, of the bank account. And we see that there are many other victims from Germany, Austria, Great Britain and France who send their money to this bank account. But these cases are still not reported. And our biggest problem is that we only see the reported cases.

His research is progressing. Last year, they confiscated these assets from another criminal group that also operated investment scams. But methodically gathering evidence takes years. At first we were unsure if we would identify any suspects and if any arrests would ever be made. But after three years, we see that there are dozens of arrests and we were able to identify really huge scam networks. He wanted to know if prosecutors knew who was behind the Milton group. So I had to ask. Who were the great leaders of the Milton group? No comment. No comment. Good night. Hello. Yes you are.

You're talking to Jen. I was moved up the chain to a retention manager. It's the same job Alex had while he worked in the call center in Ukraine. He then sold a few different brands, but since then he discovered many more that follow the same pattern. He unearthed dozens of different brands, but they all had identical registration pages. Exactly the same wording in their terms and conditions, and exactly the same login pages. Alex then discovered that they all share the same unique code in their design and the same online deposit page where customers can choose to invest with dollars, pounds or cryptocurrencies.

EverFX has the same login page, the same code and the same script in the same structure as all these other websites. Yes. So you are 100% sure it is a Milton group website? Yes, I'm one hundred percent sure. Well, let's see how many brands there are in total. 152. Wow. It's a huge network of brands, but are there other connections? We decided to follow the money. Like me, many people now hand over Bitcoin and Bitcoin is on a public ledger, which means you can follow where it goes. So it should be simple, but it isn't. Because there are thousands and thousands of crypto wallets that channel money.

When I started this journey, I put my money into the Coinevo brand. The victims have been doing this for years, investing money in other brands, including EverFX, the brand that scammed Barry. Money that moves through a complex system of wallets but ultimately ends up in just a few dozen. We suspect it is owned by the people behind the scam. We don't know for sure who owns these wallets. But mapping this network is useful because it shows that these brands are linked. We saw my Coinevo money join an EverFX money path here before continuing to the rest of the network.

This is a trade I opened and I don't like doing it so well. I'm like in the red. I have been trying to contact Coinevo but have not received a response. Maybe they know who I really am or are just interested in people who have invested the most. Antoine still hasn't called me. So I decide to cut my losses and withdraw my money. Then I get this email. Hello Jenny. The passport you sent us is fake. I guess you know that. So be pretty, please. With sugar on top. Despite the persecution, I never recovered the money that was still in the account.

So how can we find out who is behind these crimes? When Alex, the undercover mole, was working for Milton, he recorded her 2020 New Year's Eve party with a secret camera on his watch. Are there clues here about who the intellectual authors of the Milton group are? The audio reveals a man named David, who was crowned Milton's father. When I worked on the first investigation, we identified this David as Georgian citizen David Todua. Simplify complex connections in this network. We're going to give you a nickname, Mr. Orange. These are photos from his now-deleted Instagram account. Showing him at the party with other important figures of the Milton group and him posing with firearms.

So where does Mr. Orange fit into the overall Milton organization? Two years after the party, he has an office in a new call center in kyiv that sells EverFX and other Milton brands. Ukraine is clearly important to his entire operation. But they, like everyone else, were about to be in for a shock. Ukraine was invaded and Alex, monitoring the scammers from his hiding place, saw evidence online that call center staff were fleeing the war. One place he has seen job ads is in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. I have come to the capital, Tbilisi, to meet with local investigative journalist Nino Bakradze.

Hello. Hello.

I know who is. This? Yes, I know who this guy is. His name is Michel Benimini. I looked into it before Benimini was charged in Israel with tax evasion, but I never showed up at his trial. I think we should investigate for ourselves. Our own research shows that Michel Benimini, let's call him Mr. Red, registered one of Milton's first trademarks, Cap MP. This suggests that he has been involved for a long time. I'm curious, but it doesn't take long for Nino to come back with more. He has found evidence of a call center and it is active.

You were right. His name is M.G. Capital. M.G. Capital, the company founded by Yousef Mgleazde four years ago. I found his scanned ID and email address in the business record. And I have a rental contract signed by Yousef Mgleazde. And he signs a rental contract in 2019. We identified Yousef Mgleazde's profile on Facebook and then discovered the people in the photos. Then we found a person who worked in a call center and convinced him to talk to you. We met the young woman who had worked at M.G. Capital in the center of Tbilisi. She doesn't want to talk in front of the camera, that's why we don't show her face and we've changed her voice.

Ivana was told to choose a fake English-sounding name and to never reveal that she was calling from Georgia. She sold a Milton brand. But who is Joseph Mgeladze, our Mr. Green? Can your other business links tell us anything about this network? We already know that he founded and owned MG Capital, which appears to have sold Milton's brands. But Mr. Green also founded this company. Among his directors are two men who seem connected to the network. This guy, Mr. Blue, owned a company called Nash Pay, which provided technology to Milton Group brands, a company he sold to Mr.

Orange, gun lover David Todua and along with Mr. Pink . Mr. Blue is a senior at EverFX as well as other crucial Milton technology companies. And finally, some of these key companies operated from the same building that housed Orange's new office in kyiv. This all seems very cozy. The offshore world is opaque and some people spend a fortune deliberately muddying the waters of their operations. But they cannot be sure that the past will remain buried forever. As the world wakes up to the Panama Papers revelations... Back in 2016, millions of documents that were supposed to be confidential were leaked.

They revealed the true owners and inner workings of directors of hundreds of offshore companies. They were called the Panama Papers. So let's go back in time and see what the leak can tell us about our persons of interest. Four of them are there. They have a history together and appear to be running a network of non-Milton companies around the world. But many of these companies have something in common. They are linked to an office block in Tbilisi called the Pixel Building. The paper trail ends here: throughout our Panama Papers investigations, we have analyzed thousands of extraterritorial documents.

And one person appears to have founded or registered many of these early companies outside of Milton. Mr. David Kezerashvili But who is this Mr. Kezerashvili? He is a former Georgian politician. He was Defense Minister during the war against the Russians in 2008. When he left office, he began his business career. Based in London, he cannot return to Georgia because he was convicted of corruption in what he claims is a politically motivated case. Accepting this, the British courts refused to extradite him. In Georgia, some remember him as Mr. Offshore and the leak of non-Milton Company data shows that he was at the center of this network of offshore companies.

Our men were assigned high positions in these companies, which Mr. Kezerashvili registered all over the world. Several paths seem to lead to it. We have been invited back here by Europol, who have targeted some of the same people as us, and we will now join them in the call center raids. Simultaneous actions are taking place in Ukraine, Albania and North Macedonia. We have no idea where we are going. They told us to follow the car in front of us. The last time they did a raid like this, the call center bosses were warned. So everything depends on the secret.

We have entered this parking lot and the German and Georgian police are coordinating their actions. The prosecutors have just entered. But they told us that the place was already secured. Would you like to talk to us about what happened here? I don't understand. You don't understand anything I'm saying. Although you just answered me in perfect English. Did you know it was supposedly a scam? I do not want you to record this video at this time and I will not answer your questions. What was the brand they sold here? We are quite satisfied with the current situation, so we can look at all the materials and the people, and we see that some evidence is clear when it comes to the German desk, when it comes to the German market that it is aimed at.

And obviously we see pretty good indications of such activity here. Right now, there are 30 raids throughout Georgia, in the center of Tbilisi, which are affecting a company we already know: M.G Capital. These screens are really interesting. Here you have the back office of a brand called Eco Sales and you have the names of the people they called to get money from them. And here are four British names. As you can see, this is just a call center that was supposedly scamming people all over the world. And let's see if we can see how much money they got from various people.

Looking at our images afterwards I found a note "no obligations, wants to buy a property, I don't dispute the number but has savings of less than 10K, very p***y". * should scam soon For German prosecutors, this has been four years of planning and now they have time to reflect. We know that, of course, the FCA in Britain says that scams are the biggest threat to private investors. But on the other hand, thanks to our actions and our investigations in recent years, we see that there are also some positive effects, that the perpetrators are more careful and at least do not target the German market as much as perhaps they did.

Two or three years ago, the total damages still amount to hundreds of millions. We can probably talk about billions, not only in Germany, but throughout the world. We saw many British victims on call center computer screens. If you finished your investigation, where would that leave you? We have to be realistic. We can't save the world. Saving the German market is already quite hard work.As far as I know, there should be some kind of law enforcement in Britain. So that is your main responsibility. And to look at it from a legal perspective, it's not in our jurisdiction.

The raids topped the news in Georgia. Mgladze, our Mr. Green, held a press conference after one of the fraudulent brands was raided at an office he owned. He says his company rents space and offices to other companies, but he doesn't know what it is. A company that rents racks really does it. He then he is saying that he was just renting space to another call center but that he owns M.G Capital. Yes, we know that he founded M.G Capital and he also mentions that he was a partner, a business partner of David Kezerashvili. So we know that the links between these men go back a long time.

Thanks to the leak of the Panama Papers. So the pattern was that Kezerashvili was the link between our men. But if the actual links were confidential before, could they be confidential again? Fast forward to the present. All of the men appear to have been key figures in the Milton group that ran or owned technology companies or the fraudulent EverFX brand. But does Kezerashvili fit in now? Well, he's actually not on the paperwork. This is what we can see. He is connected to this company, which used to own EverFX. Through his venture capital firm, he owned the brand and website of this technology company, which built the EverFX trading platform and website.

His personal companies' email servers were on the same private servers as EverFX, Axios, and Newage. He owns a building in kyiv where the original call center moved in 2020 and where they sold EverFX. And where Mr. Orange had an office where many of these companies were housed, and which was raided in the Europol action in Ukraine. And this gives us an idea of ​​Kezerashvili's social circle. At a wedding in 2018, he was photographed with Mr Orange and Mr Red, as well as other key Milton figures. He also has interesting connections on social media. Kezerashvili regularly likes and shares Facebook and LinkedIn posts from various tech groups, as well as EverFX and its successor Axios.

And his Facebook friends include at least 45 other people linked to some of these companies. And of course, he's also Facebook friends with Mr. Pink, Mr. Blue, Mr. Green, and Mr. Orange. And Mr. Red? Well, that's his cousin we went to. Mr Kezerashvili's £80 million home in London to see if he could answer these questions about his role. Hello, I am a journalist. I would like to speak with David Kezerashvili. Is available? No. Not available? Well. Thank you so much. OK, bye. He did not want to speak to us, but his lawyers made it clear that Mr. Kezerashvili strongly denies any relationship with Milton or that he benefited financially from scams.

He says that as far as he knows, EverFX was a legitimate business and that the connections we have found with the people and IT behind it prove nothing. Chelidze and Gogeshvili strongly deny our accusations and say that EverFX is a legitimate and regulated platform. They deny any knowledge of Milton or any connection between EverFX and the brands. We identify. Suggesters have misused their source code and branding to confuse users. They say EverFX has never had a crypto wallet and has no control over how its third-party payment processors direct funds. Mgeladze said: "I completely deny these allegations.

I am in no way involved with Milton. I have never owned call centers or any other business engaged in mis-selling financial products." Neither Mr. Benimini nor Mr. Todua responded to our questions. EverFX denied our accusations and said that they are a legitimate and regulated platform where the risks are fully explained. They investigated Barry's case and discovered that he was responsible for his losses. In our anonymous case, we were told that his losses were due to him moving to an unrelated company and that they cooperated fully with the FCA. The investigation that Alex and I launched culminated in police raids on Milton's offices in five countries, closing 15 call centers.

Only five suspects were arrested in those countries, all of them employees. Which is little consolation to Milton's victims. I feel completely ashamed of how well I was fooled. I just don't want my friends to know how stupid I've been. I have always worked very hard for everything I have earned in my life, only to lose $30,000 to a group of scammers. I was absolutely devastated by it. I just don't feel like I can trust anyone again. It has taken us more than a year to uncover the identities of some of the biggest players we believe are involved in this billion-dollar scam.

Walking through this complex and sophisticated tangle of shell companies, digital evidence and crypto wallets, we felt like we were able to name them for the first time. Since the raids, Alex has been tracking Milton's crypto wallets. So the volume is less. The volume is less. That means the raids have had a big impact. Yes, I think so, because we see a very significant decrease in turnover. Good for the victims. Good for the victims. So the raids had an impact. But our recent analysis suggests that scams are now rebounding to almost 85% of what they were. So can this billion dollar scam ever stop?

The money that flows from these types of crimes through the offshore world into the pockets of a small number of people is so attractive and so corrupting that it is incredibly difficult for any society, in any political system, to muster the means to stop it. Four months after the raids, we are not aware of any prosecutions against any of the people we have identified.

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